It's hard not to see this as a consolation prize. In 1969, we went to the moon.
In 2026, with all the benefits of a tech industry that has become ever more powerful, with endless money poured into innovation, our 'rough guide back to the moon' is an AI model that maps it. It's powerful and impressive, of course, and doubtless very useful to researchers, and space exploration is not a priority--all of that is true, sure.
But to have the fruits of 50+ years of technological progress result not in going back to the moon, or onto other challenges, but just a refinement in looking at the moon. Is this the best giant leap we can muster now? So much innovation and yet we lack a capability we used to have.
I know there are all sorts of ways to explain this away, but it still makes me sad.
Apollo - Cold war. USA must do it before Russia and win the space race. Money is not a restriction. USA did it before Russia and won the space race.
Artemis - Prove a multi-national program can function under financial, economic, political, and even technical restrictions. We can't simply land and observe, it needs to be a team effort under a tight budget.
... or maybe just called some convenient events "space race" and refused to notice the others. Like a literal space colony circling above, for example. If you control the framing you control the reality.
Going to the moon is a publicity stunt. Been there done that. There are very few good arguments for putting anything on the moon, much less a human (which generally can do much less because all the life support needed can't be put into science). All the arguments for going to the moon need to be considered against everything else we can do - opportunity cost is real, but investing in the moon we are not investing in something else. (including less working hours...) Most of the things we developed for the moon would have been done anyway, and we don't know what things would have been developed sooner if we were not focusing on the moon.
Be realistic. You can support going to the moon. However be honest: there isn't much value from it and there are plenty of reasons to say we shouldn't.
>"There are very few good arguments for putting anything on the moon, much less a human (which generally can do much less because all the life support needed can't be put into science)."
The arguments are entirely romantic. But then, what exactly is life without romance? That's probably the single greatest loss of modern society; that we've been convinced nothing matters but the material and concrete.
At that point though, there are lots of other romances to peruse. Somebody could go to the moon, but it won't be me. I could however go to my local art museum - at a much smaller costs than my share of sending someone else to the moon, but I'd get more value from my trip to the art museum than someone else on the moon.
Or in my case I just went to my local high school marching band competition, and got to hear from great music. YMMV on what you find more romantic.
People want to go to the moon, you could make your same argument for lots of things humans have done but at the end of the day science is not the reason 99% of people care about or want to colonize space. People have a desire to colonize space
Some people. I'm all for allowing those people do to it.
However the context tends to include I'm being asked for fund the dreams of those people (via taxes) and that impacts my ability to fund my own dreams.
I've heard a lot of arguments against human space exploration, but "We could put that energy into working less" is probably one of the more out-there arguments that's hard to take seriously.
Work is a necessary evil. If it is not necessary, then it is just a regular evil. There are no credible arguments that going to the moon is necessary, or supports some other necessary goal.
Of course by work, I mean work directed by somebody else to serve their ends, in exchange for money to live your own life. If we could afford to have people work five hours a week and still maintain a functioning society, then surely it is a moral obligation for us to do that. If you decide you want or need to do some kind of voluntary work to keep your mental health intact, so much the better. And if those happy people want to voluntarily commit some of their energy to going to the moon for no reason, then good for them.
I really cannot imagine taking your position. Working less is the pretty much the only thing we should be putting energy into.
Nobody is talking about slavery here. You need to do something to feed yourself, otherwise you are making somebody else a slave to feed you. As a society there are some very disabled people we can accept this for, but when someone isn't supporting themselves that is enslaving someone else.
Not sure this reply makes much sense. I said that if we (humans) become more productive, i.e. that we can produce sufficient food/water/shelter/whatever with less effort, then the first goal after that should be to reduce the amount of drudgery the average person has to put up with, rather than (say) keeping the amount of drudgery the same and spaffing a bunch of fuel into space. I'm not sure where in that you see someone being enslaved to feed me.
Incidentally, we tolerate this kind of "slavery" just fine when we charge people rent for basic shelter. The cost of maintaining the asset (the house) is far less than the cost we actually charge people, so in your sense when I pay rent I am being enslaved by the landlord to support their lifestyle.
Finally, you brought up slavery. The guy I'm replying to just said "work is good". I don't think it's good that we make people destroy their bodies in amazon fulfilment centers. People know what's good for them, if they want to do work let them do the work they want. But to say "no, you have to do the work I want you to do" under the hypothesis that we have plenty of stuff to go around (and we absolutely do) is just sick.
Good for you. And I hope you never get laid off, burned out, or anything else.
I however do not get my fulfillment via work. I work to live, and I do [mostly] enjoy my work. However I have a very long todo list that I'm not getting done in part because I don't have the time to work on it (and in part because I don't have the money for the tools/parts I need)
I think this sort of view is quite myopic. In general space has practically infinite everything - land, resources, energy, and more. It has the potential to enable, in turn, infinite expansion of humanity. But we're not going to get to the endgame without playing the opening first.
The path to international air flight began with often suicidal attempts to flap our wings and act like birds, with many thinking we'd never go anywhere beyond that. With space we're already a bit more advanced, yet we're far from where we need to be - and the only way we're going to get there is by going out and starting on a very long journey.
We didn't do anything in 1969. Landing on the Moon and leaving a flag is like seeing the Wright Flyer go 260m, waving a Mission Accomplished banner, and then quitting with that as the state of art of flight - a mildly interesting novelty that was, at best, a proof of concept.
Even if you think a space industry is useful in general, there is no reason for humans to be involved. Robots are superior to humans for this application today and will only become more superior in the future.
Why pursue space exploration if all we can do is send robots there? The only meaningful thing for humanity is sending Humans to places.
Gathering more resources so the overlords can have more humans enslaved with shinier golden handcuffs, who can consume more so number line goes up is not a meaningful goal to pursuit, and robotic-only commercially rationalized spaceflight has only this to offer.
Scientific discovery, so we can have better simulations about things of no use or effect on us? Why? Taking people to places and utilizing the resources there, and building a more resilient humanity is a worthy endeavor, and while robots are useful for that, ultimately human spaceflight (or interplanetary/interstellar travel) is he goal, not having only a space industry.
What is the point in having a colony of maybe dozens of people completely dependent on shipments from Earth? Building a self-sustaining colony is so far outside the realm of possibility that it isn't worth thinking about, and building a symbolic outpost servers no practical purpose.
> space has practically infinite everything - land, resources, energy
The Earth has more land than mankind will ever need. The Earth has effectively infinite energy from the Sun. And most of the resources we need are derived from biological matter, which Space lacks.
Ah, but humanity is an expansive and consuming force, as is natural since most forces in the universe are entropy increasing ones. And since amino acids have been discovered on asteroids and tardigrades and fungus have been shown to survive space travel, we can't even say that Space provably lacks biological matter. Expanding (back?) into space is our manifest destiny, and good for the price of real estate too since all of earth becomes a luxury destination.
Population growth has been slowing for a long time, and is actually already below replacement level in most parts of the world outside Africa. It's unlikely that we will ever reach a global human population of even 11 billion. Some estimates put the peak at under 9 billion.
Unless humanity goes extinct in the near future this is certainly inaccurate.
People don't realize how rapidly fertility affects populations. Take a place with a fertility rate of 1. That means each successive generation (which tends to be about 20 years, or the the window of fertility for a gen - from age ~20 to ~40) will decrease in size by half, in a compounding fashion. So over 1 century, that's a 97% decline (0.5^5) in generational size. Extinction comes shockingly fast.
But the opposite is also true. So what's going to happen is that low fertility populations are simply going to go extinct. That's going to be just lovely for humanity as it also corresponds with higher income, higher education, higher liberalism, higher secularism, and so on. And the current high fertility groups will come to quickly dominate the world. So it's kind of amusing in a way that Biblical texts will indeed come to pass - you'll have groups like Amish or Haredi, the meek - who happen to have high fertility rates, indeed inheriting the Earth.
This is part of the reason fertility is, by far, the biggest crisis facing humanity today. All love to the Amish and Haredi, but I don't want the Earth to turn into a planet of overalls and sidelocks. Even that would probably be just liminal, but we need some sort of high tech, high intelligence, high fertility sect to emerge. It's probably going to require something to akin to a modern religion, though presumably without a deity. Or maybe the Mormons had it right all along.
What's to disprove? They are prima facie false, not just formally (because "ever" and "effectively infinite" are obviously exaggerations), but also empirically, here and now - mankind already needs more land than Earth has, and more energy than Earth can spare.
"The Earth has more land than mankind will ever need."
"The Earth has effectively infinite energy from the Sun.
Not to mention that it seems more healthy to have a far off frontier for a human civilization. It makes it possible for people to try something new, something different, brings innovation, etc. Without it, some people might just be too unhappy in the regular society.
> "ever" and "effectively infinite" are obviously exaggerations
I see no exaggeration, obvious or otherwise. Scientific consensus is that mankind's population is going to peak in the next century.
> mankind already needs more land than Earth has
By what basis? There's no shortage of land. There's a shortage of land close to popular population centers, and that tends to be the land that people want to live on most. But that's an inherent geometric and social problem which outer space definitely doesn't solve, in fact it makes it worse.
> more energy than Earth can spare
Earth doesn't provide its own energy, the sun does. Even fossil fuels, biomass and wind power were all originally energy from the sun. The exception is nuclear - Earth does have an unusually high concentration of heavily elements like uranium and plutonium.
The bottleneck has always been development and delivery, not availability of energy itself. On just the land we currently use to grow corn for ethanol gasoline, we could build enough solar panels to power the entire US. And I certainly don't need to tell you about nuclear - the only reason entire civilizations aren't already powered by it is the time and expense and risk of building the plants.
What energy does outer space provide? You have solar, which we have here, and nuclear, which we have here. (You also have a variety of ideas that exist in science fiction but not the real world, like dyson spheres - I surely hope you aren't referring to such as the basis of your arguments.) None of this is new, and none of this solves the problems of development and delivery.
Yes, especially if you add up the ocean floors, Antarctica, Siberia and northern Canada ... all far, far more hospitable, useful, and cost-effective than anything in space.
Radioactive, toxic, dry, low-gravity and anoxic land isn't exactly prime real estate. Even the North Pole is a better environment for humans to live in than the Moon or Mars are.
> In general space has practically infinite everything - land, resources, energy, and more. It has the potential to enable, in turn, infinite expansion of humanity.
Love the (sorry, but greedy) take. Maybe we shouldn't expand infinitely. I don't see our species as that special. Maybe we should stay a bit modest, and errm, down to the earth in our ambitions.
Both humans and resources can't be in infinite number at the same time. Something can be infinite relative to other, and I like the current balance, thanks.
Why should we not expand into space? To make sure that all the lifeless rocks in it stay lifeless? If earth were twice as large would you say that logically we should only inhabit half of that earth or do you believe that human beings have a natural claim to everything that can be reached via boats and legs but not via rockets?
Personally, I would like a future where I can see other planets with my own eyes and dislike a future where the entire species is dependent on one planet being habitable.
Well, the nothing part is an often forgotten selling point - that makes it possible to go really far, to send signals long distances & for the light of the sun to reach quite a large distance unobstructed. You don't get any benefits under a few km of water for example.
You fail to comprehend just how large space is. Almost all of space is well out of reach. There is zero reason to think we will ever be able to overcome the laws of relativity, which in turn mean we will never be able to reach the stars. I know, this negative comment makes you mad, but there is every reason to think it is the case.
A SciFi generation ship could maybe do that to the closest stars before it fails completely - but we have reason to think those stars will have any planet we can terraform. (ignoring the ethics if life exists - we don't have the technology to detect life on other planets)
Mars is the only planet that could potentially support human life. Even then the best parts are about as nice as Antarctica - not very nice. Which is to say a catastrophic failure of life support gives you seconds to get the backup [scuba type gear?] working as opposed to guaranteed death. Mars is a lot smaller than earth and has much less energy (less sun). Thus there isn't much potential there.
Everything else we can reasonably reach is much harder to work with than Mars.
I just made a comment in another thread that Cape York, a huge chunk of northern Queensland has a mere 18,000 inhabitants. It's more sparsely occupied than northern Alaska by nearly a factor of two.
Why? Because it is low-value land due to monsoons turning the dirt into mud, and that dirt doesn't have enough minerals in it so agriculture is too difficult to bother with.
It has free oxygen. It has 1g gravity. You can fly there for about a thousand dollars instead of a thousand billion. The radiation might give you skin cancer, but won't kill you immediately. There's too much water. It has animals you can hunt and eat. Etc, etc...
Practically nobody wants to live there that wasn't already there for generations.
If the human race can't be bothered occupying land like that, then colonising Mars is so, so far down the list it isn't even on the same page, book, or library shelf.
The desire to fly to space can be compared with such for going to Everest, the place less hospitable than Cape York, yet having quite an interest from all sides. However, exploration of space could be way more practical than conquering the highest point on Earth - it serves scientific goals, and after science often come applications. There are many useful technologies which grew from space exploration and particularly from manned space programs, and we can expect those benefits to follow those who keeps studying space and learning to live close to the object of study.
We're just starting an energetic space exploration with appearance of better tools in the recent years. Getting to the Moon is relatively easy, and could be barely done with much more modest technology; now we plan a bigger scale program. Getting people to Mars is undoubtedly more complex, but still within reach of the existing - or almost existing - technology. Getting furter from Earth, while not immediately in the plans, may get just as possible and useful with time, and we shouldn't claim to know what could be our reasons tomorrow to visit, say, Ceres or Venus. There is no scientific impossibility for flying almist anywhere in Solar system - the matter is only in needs and economic costs. Our predecessors could be confused with our habits of flying between continents and islands the way we can and do today - similarly some of us may not see the immediate reason to leave Earth - that can pass, as past habits got changed to our current ones.
No one has aspirations or desire to live on Everest. They just want to go there plant a flag and say they did it before rushing back to.Civilization. Hmmm kinda like the moon.
You would wear an oxygen mask for your entire visit to stay alive? along with the climb because flying helicopter up there is incredibly dangerous and nobody would be willing to do regularly for a job. In fact, only one person has ever done it just to prove that it could be done.
I mean, I don't know you, but I feel like most people are not truly considering the level of discomfort, such a visit would entail. Much less being on the Moon or mars for any extended period of time.
I looked into going to Everest - it is possible for a normal person to go - you need to save up a lot of money ($10-20k) which is within reach of most people if you really want to go. However even if you are filthy rich you still shouldn't: there is a lot of litter on the mountain because it is almost impossible to make the whole trip without leaving things behind. Combine with the danger and you really should not make the trip. Instead a have few photographers and scientists (who have real science to do up there - I'm not sure what there is) make the trip, or better yet a robot - and then look at pictures/videos and read their reports.
The moon is unlikely to be self sustaining - gravity is too low. In turn that means that earth will forever be polluting the earths atmosphere (CO2!) to supply it.
Well, the solar system itself is ridiculously huge - saying "lets don't bother" because interstellar flight looks cumbersome with current technology ? Seems like quite the premature optimization.
Yes, while for now there is no known method for useful interstellar flight, spaceships with nuclear reactors could reduce the time required for traveling through the Solar System to acceptable values.
Earth is by far the best we can get, but on big enough spaceships it is possible to create living conditions that are better than on any other body of the Solar System, except perhaps on a ship floating in the clouds of Venus.
The experiments done on ISS suggest that for optimum health a gravity of at least two thirds of that of Earth is necessary, which disqualifies almost all the bodies from the Solar System, because they are either too small or too big.
On a rotating spaceship it is possible to create any level of artificial gravity. In theory, one could make an underground rotating living space on Mars, to increase the apparent gravity, but that would consume much more energy and it would complicate entering and exiting, in comparison with a rotating spaceship.
Obviously, something like this will not be built any time soon, but nonetheless an expansion into the Solar System is possible even without living on the surfaces of other celestial bodies.
> It should be remembered, however, that the bird successful in flight is an evolution. It has taken a great many generations of his kind to develop his muscular system in just the right way for flying purposes, and very likely the process has consumed many centuries of time. The mistake of the scientist would appear to be in his assumption that he can do with much less suitable material by a single act of creative genius what nature accomplishes with such immeasurable deliberation. [1]
> Face it, earth is all we get: make it last.
Recent sci fi novels I've ready have been really depressing because while maybe some colony planet is doing OK the Earth is a used up husk, and I'd like to think that we could have both: a planet we chose to make last and successful footholds on other bodies (water moons and water planets make more sense to me)
We'd be much better off building colonies on the bottom of the ocean than on the moon or mars (or a cylinder floating at a lagrange point.)
After we run out of space on the ocean I suppose it will make sense to consider space colonies, but I think you are really underestimating the technical challenges.
I personally think it's a form of tunnel vision to think that any sort of extensive space travel is anything other than a complete fantasy.The very laws of physics as we know them, say that it is essentially impossible.
We don't even know if it's possible for actual life just simply life itself, to exist anywhere except on Earth for any length of time. We have exactly one example. Earth. All tests to the contrary in space show that life dies for all kinds of non-obvious reasons when removed from Earth for any extended period of time.
I personally hope it's not true and I do enthusiastically watch the progress. However, math is really, really bad.
Also mass drivers so you can ship ridiculous amount of lunar oxygen, aluminium & even general dirt for shielding into the cislunar space. Not to mention any materials processed by high energy industrial processed provered by solar forges on the surface of the moon (both thermal & powered by locally manufactured solar panels).
Is that your litmus test--it has to have "value"? What's the value of Hubble? Of the Nancy Grace Roman observatory? Are you against those too? Maybe you prefer if they had left it as a spy satellite--at least that has real value.
Humans are going to walk on the fucking moon! How can you not be excited about that? There is value in pushing the frontier, in doing things at the limit of human technology, in seeing new worlds through human eyes.
> Humans are going to walk on the fucking moon! How can you not be excited about that?
Been there done that. Last happened in 1972, there is nothing exciting about it anymore. I have other things in my life that are exciting - things that really are exciting.
I'm taking my local scouts camping this weekend. Should be an experience (it is expected to rain all weekend).
I just finished helping my local high school marching band's annual event - I got to hear a lot of great music which I find exciting.
I slept in the zoo next to the fishes with the girl scouts not long ago.
You can guess by the above the ages of my kids - which in turn implies a lot of other excitement.
There are plenty of other things as well. My local town art festival is exciting to a lot of people even though I didn't care enough to attend this year. There are a lot of museums, parks, concerts, ... in my local area to be exciting about. I have a shop full of tools for my various hobbies that I'm excited about. If you can't find a lifetime of things to be excited about withing walking distance of your bedroom you need to learn to enjoy your life more. (with apologies to the disabled who can't leave their bed)
While I agree that repeating a 60 year old achievement is pointless, one of NASA's goals for Artemis, etc. is having a platform for R&D for human exploration of Mars. There aren't other nearby large bodies on which, and around which, to work out and shake out all the new tech for Mars. R&D actually at Mars would be very expensive and slower.
Then again, that could be NASA trying to justify or make the best of a pointless program imposed on them by politicians.
An aside: Did anyone in the 1960s wonder at the bizarre choice of Apollo for a moon program? How is it that Artemis is still available as a program name?
You should look into the Artemis program! Not only are we going back, but we're building a base, which will effectively be the spiritual successor to the ISS.
I’ll have to see it to believe it. Artemis was slow but seemed to be making progress and now things have been shaken up again and plans totally changed. To me that seems like it’s not going to happen
The US put 5% of the federal budget into the original moon mission. NASA and SpaceX and the US Space Force combined don't spend anywhere close to that on R&D.
A huge variety of tools and technology that billions of people use daily.
What did we ultimately have to show for the money poured into Apollo? I'm a big fan of space exploration but putting twelve people up there for a few days at a time is pretty small potatoes compared to, say, the creation of smart phones or vast improvements in solar power and batteries or a thousand other things that have been done since 1972. I can push a (virtual) button on a rectangle I carry in my pocket and be instantly on a video call with my mother who lives a thousand miles away. And I don't even have to pay by the minute. That's positively magical, and in terms of actual real-world impact on average people it's far more significant than moon landings.
"Following the use of integrated circuit (IC) chips in the Interplanetary Monitoring Platform (IMP) in 1963, IC technology was later adopted for the AGC.[17] The Apollo flight computer was one of the first computers to use silicon IC chips.[4][8]"
A lot of money went to IC technology thanks to that, directly leading to the phones you mention. It is quite likely that without just these specific Apollo investments into ICs, we would be quite a few years behind on computer technology.
I think the problem is not the technological advancement, it’s the limits of physics which are the same as in today as it was back in 1960s.
We have immense computing power now compared to 50 years ago. But that doesn’t help to escape the gravity well of earth. We’re still using the same chemical rockets to go to space, haven’t invented any new type of rocket drives
That's a very bad take. Rocket costs are not driven by physics, they're driven by more mundane issues, like single-use hardware. The cost floor dictated by cost of propellant is remarkably low.
Yeah, the moment propellant drives your launch costs, you have effectively won the chemical rocket launch game.
And can then transition to more advanced stuff, like space resource extraction (so you can only launch important bits), launch loops/skyhooks/tether shenanigans in general, etc.
There is a dumb ass simple explanation: in about the same time it took to build rockets that took people to the Moon, we figured out that there was nothing to do there for humans. Or anywhere in the Solar System for that matter.
I mean until 1960 people expected to find whole civilisation or at least intelligent life on Venus and until 1964, at least some life on Mars. By then, it was too late to stop Apollo, but already no point to go anywhere else or expand Moon presence.
But we are going back to the moon. By 2030, I would bet, humans will land on the moon again. Probably Americans first, but if not, definitely Chinese.
And this time, both countries are planning ambitious missions--not just flags-and-footprints, but bases and resource extraction (ice from the lunar south pole).
SpaceX Starship, the vehicle that will return to the moon, can carry 100 tons to the lunar surface--compared to less than 10 tons for Apollo. Moreover, whereas a single Saturn V launch cost almost a billion dollars to launch, Starship should cost a third the price. Effectively, we'll be able to deliver cargo to the moon for 1/30th the price of Apollo. That's real progress.
I've been following the space program since the 1970s and I have never been more excited about it.
The show For All Mankind is a truly bittersweet look at how space exploration could have turned out differently.
I’m sure the technical challenges are much greater than how they are portrayed in the show. But certainly there has been a lack of will and optimism and imagination as well.
Well, we had people swing by the moon for the first in decades this April, with a robotic mission planned for November & about 7 more robotic missions planned for next year:
I read this a bit fast and with half a brain (because I'm in a boring meeting), but I'm not sure what an "AI model" is over just a common or garden model.
I get the achievement here: it's quite difficult to combine data from these various sensors into one. Is the "AI" bit referring to how that integration was done?
did not know we have -246°c to play with, which means the potential for the whole set of usefull volitiles is there, not just water/O²/H², and given that there is also the potential for +121°c very close to cold deposits, gives most of the basics for refining a whole host of molecules and compounds.
Non of that changing the fact that bieng on the moon for any extended time is going to SUCK , the dust is horrible in every possible way, low gravity will weaken , radiation is heavy, and all of the many other risks will add up to a poor career choice, so the compensation will have to be
1 tour, and retire in guaranteed style.
Basicly flying a great big ass laser in a lunar polar orbit and zapping the shaded dark sections of craters while some other satelites watch the resulting gass plumes, and of course carve your initials while no one is looking.
The band where there is enough solar exposure for power and cold traps is going to be narrow and dramaticly reduce the number of candidates, which has very likely been figured out years ago, especialy for earth facing spots.
Still going to need the heavy lift of multiple starship landings and some kind of 'moon link' satelite network.
I'm not gonna lie, I'm closer to a conspiracy theorist and non-believer than I am to trust history on the moon landing stuff. Doesn't help that I wasn't alive when it happened, and that we haven't since gone again. It feels so nonsensical to me, I would love for someone to help me educate myself on it from a more grounded point of view that can satisfy my paranoia. Did we really go there? How come we (as in humanity, any other nation whatsoever) haven't gone again since?
Yes we really went there, quite a few times in the 1970s. We have been again, also several times, with rovers and landers. As for why not humans since then? There's bugger all there to justify the extreme cost (at this time). It's an unpleasant ball made from tiny abrasive dust particles that is more easily explored with robots. The prestige thing is done; until we set up some base there in support of some broader mission (scientific or exploratory) there isn't a reason to send people.
I've put a couple of resources here for you. The first one described the program from a neutral perspective (in line with what you ask - grounded POV to satisfy paranoia): https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/moon-landing/
Finally this is an excellent jumping-off point to understand the Apollo program in more detail, once you're satisfied that it did happen (if you don't think so, you'll reject the source out of hand.) https://www.nasa.gov/the-apollo-program/
The program itself was really, really, really cool and is worth reading about. A truly enormous achievement involving millions of people and an entire country's scientific and engineering capacity.
I've listened through those flights few times and it still each time takes me back to memories still giving me goosebumps. Especially Apollo 11 when I was nine year old kid listening tiny battery radio all nights at our summer cottage attic.
That's so cool. I feel like society did a bad job passing on the torch of that throughout history to the newer generation, especially outside the US (I'm not an American), so a lot of us are really disconnected with what went down outside of the US.
I don’t usually get parenting right but the stars lined up for this one: I got hold of the Lego Saturn V kit (1969 pieces!) and my two kids and I built it over a few days while listening to this in the background. Last piece on right about the time “the Eagle has landed.”
The "moon landings didn't happen" conspiracies are, of course, inane, but they come from an understandable place. If moon landings really did happen, how could they just have stopped? There's a disconnect between the event and the consequences.
The resolution is to realize that Apollo was a dead-end stunt, not some universe-altering historical event. The lack of consequences was an inevitable result of the structure of what Apollo was.
Yeah, if you read a bit into the the pre-lunar-Apollo era, the plans were sensible - LEO space stations, space shipyards and orbital assembly, lunar space stations, eventually a landing and a surface stations & resource usage. All gradual sustainable infrastructure building.
Then all that went out the airlock & the whole thing devolved into a long-term unsustainable race. :P
Those plans were only sensible if launch costs could be greatly reduced.
It ended up that the government-contractor axis wasn't able to reduce launch costs, not due to technical reason, but political and institutional ones. There had to be a different approach, as pursued by SpaceX.
Yeah, but I think it is all related - there were various programs to reuse the Saturn and other rockets, there are pictures of them dunking engines in the sea & studying what it does to them or even the rather insane concept for a giant helicopter for catching the first stage of Saturn V. Reading the early space program history it really looks like the consensus was "of course we will reuse those rockets, it would be insane to not do so".
But then as time pressure set in & money was suddenly not a problem, all that went to the wayside. And by the time Apollo was over, it seems the mindset that rockets are expensive and expandable set in. If it was just inertia or also business interests of the by then entrenched launcher contractors is hard to tell.
Yes, we really went there. There's zero legitimate doubt. If nothing else, consider: the Soviets were locked in a massive propaganda war with the US over the respective countries' space achievements, with the Soviets spending vast resources to show that their ideology was superior by showing what they could achieve in space. They had no trouble tracking American activity in space. If the moon landings had been fake, wouldn't the Soviets have brought their receipts and utterly humiliated their rivals?
We haven't gone again since because there's not much point to it. The US spent an amount of money equivalent to about 10 Manhattan Projects to ultimately put a dozen people on the moon for a cumulative total of somewhat less than one person-month. There was no military utility to it, no commercial benefit, just some science and exploration. Once you've done that a few times, what's the impetus to continue?
The technology was so bleeding-edge that each mission required a huge amount of bespoke manufacturing that got thrown away after a single use, and massive teams of people to run everything, such that each individual mission still cost billions of inflation-adjusted dollars. The American public's stomach for spending such vast sums of money just didn't last. Imagine if you needed to build and throw away an entire Airbus A380 to reach the summit of Mt. Everest. Maybe it would have been summited a few times to show it could be done, but we probably wouldn't keep doing it.
Because instead of a gradual progression and space infrastructure building (as was the original plan before Kennedy set the goal to Lunar landing before 1960s are over, its well documented in NASA history pages).
As a result a space race with the Soviets developed, resulting in the USA winning & Soviets loosing - at a price. The Apollo hardware was a racing hardware, like a race car, build to win a race and little more. As a result, the whole program was horrendously expensive to run & it was politically unworkable to continue running it once a victory in the space race has been achieved.
There was no shortage of people calling to continue not just with Moon but space exploration & industrialization in general (with a good example being Gerard O'Neill - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerard_K._O%27Neill#Space_colo...). But they could never get the beancounters & shortsighted politicians to allocate the necessary costs to get things going.
What I think changed is both the technology finally getting cheap enough that more entities can finally get involved without begging a government for a massive budget, because launcher reuse was demonstrated and even just because a bunch of very rich people who like space got involved & can do it themselves without depending on others.
We may be approaching technologically to expanding into the universe but we are certainly not there spiritually. Not to say that we shouldn't pursue this, there are probably war races in space already, but it seems to me that a better path would be growing spiritually before we expand. I wouldn't like to be in a place where we have the technical capability to reach Mars before we learn to live in peace on earth and take good care of our home.
Going back into space will require doing so with a hard nosed commercial mindset. Things on that scale are done because they are profitable, not because of putatively higher minded considerations.
I think our collective spirit is in the best place it's ever been for actually going into space, it's just not the spirit you were probably imagining.
The people building the road to space aren't spending time on your concerns. What you should expect is that whatever spiritual future lays ahead of us, for better or worse, will come from them: they will not wait for you to provide whatever it is you have in mind. Their minds are filled by dreams and plans of unlimited real-estate, unlimited energy and unlimited wealth.
Lunacies 5, 6 & 7 are the only things that make the Artemis program useful. Landing 1t on the moon is an expensive, useless, performative flags and footprints mission. Landing 100t keeps the other moon dreams alive.
> When will it be safe and cost-efficient to - instead of deorbiting toward Earth's atmosphere - Capture and Haul and Rendezvous and gently Land orbital scrap on non-earth locations like the Moon or Mars or a thrust-retrofitted asteroid for later processing?
Is there any amount of time in a higher altitude orbit - or an
Earth-Moon lunar cycler orbit - that would sanitize the outer surface of a spacecraft like ISS? Or will all such attempts cause adaptation?
Would ISS be more useful as an oxygen tank in earth-moon orbit than in Earth's atmosphere and ocean?
> What about solar sintering + induction heating of lunar regolith?
> Basalt, Glass,
> Molten oxide electrolysis of regolith would yield Oxygen, Silicon, Iron, Aluminum, and Titanium for 3d printing and for solar panels and semiconductors.
> Is there a sensor for inside of a rover or a vehicle wheel to sample the regolith falling within the wheel before it pours out to self clear?
Does this model include a regolith map or a soil map? Where is there Carbon on the moon?
> Most of a deep-space journey is coasting along gravitational contours that physicists collectively call the Interplanetary Transport Network — a web of low-energy pathways that connect orbits around planets, moons and Lagrange points
> The results show a reduced fuel consumption of at least 58.80 m/s as compared to the literature. This difference can be useful for mission designers, while the efficiency of the technique can potentially extend the results to other types of transfers in space.
Where are the L1 and L2 Lagrangian points when you consider the mass of the moon in addition to the earth and the sun?
Lyapunov exponents in SQG/DDF too.
This month I've been learning about the differences between SQG and DDF Dilatant Dark Fluid (Fedi) in regards to n-body gravity research.
125 comments
[ 4.1 ms ] story [ 110 ms ] threadIn 2026, with all the benefits of a tech industry that has become ever more powerful, with endless money poured into innovation, our 'rough guide back to the moon' is an AI model that maps it. It's powerful and impressive, of course, and doubtless very useful to researchers, and space exploration is not a priority--all of that is true, sure.
But to have the fruits of 50+ years of technological progress result not in going back to the moon, or onto other challenges, but just a refinement in looking at the moon. Is this the best giant leap we can muster now? So much innovation and yet we lack a capability we used to have.
I know there are all sorts of ways to explain this away, but it still makes me sad.
Apollo - Cold war. USA must do it before Russia and win the space race. Money is not a restriction. USA did it before Russia and won the space race.
Artemis - Prove a multi-national program can function under financial, economic, political, and even technical restrictions. We can't simply land and observe, it needs to be a team effort under a tight budget.
https://www.planetary.org/charts/apollo-vs-artemis-spending
... or maybe just called some convenient events "space race" and refused to notice the others. Like a literal space colony circling above, for example. If you control the framing you control the reality.
Be realistic. You can support going to the moon. However be honest: there isn't much value from it and there are plenty of reasons to say we shouldn't.
The arguments are entirely romantic. But then, what exactly is life without romance? That's probably the single greatest loss of modern society; that we've been convinced nothing matters but the material and concrete.
Or in my case I just went to my local high school marching band competition, and got to hear from great music. YMMV on what you find more romantic.
However the context tends to include I'm being asked for fund the dreams of those people (via taxes) and that impacts my ability to fund my own dreams.
What??? I bet you consume large quantities of art and romance, like everyone else. Like look at the tremendous choices you have for entertainment.
Of course by work, I mean work directed by somebody else to serve their ends, in exchange for money to live your own life. If we could afford to have people work five hours a week and still maintain a functioning society, then surely it is a moral obligation for us to do that. If you decide you want or need to do some kind of voluntary work to keep your mental health intact, so much the better. And if those happy people want to voluntarily commit some of their energy to going to the moon for no reason, then good for them.
I really cannot imagine taking your position. Working less is the pretty much the only thing we should be putting energy into.
“the superfluous is highly necessary”
– Voltaire
Incidentally, we tolerate this kind of "slavery" just fine when we charge people rent for basic shelter. The cost of maintaining the asset (the house) is far less than the cost we actually charge people, so in your sense when I pay rent I am being enslaved by the landlord to support their lifestyle.
Finally, you brought up slavery. The guy I'm replying to just said "work is good". I don't think it's good that we make people destroy their bodies in amazon fulfilment centers. People know what's good for them, if they want to do work let them do the work they want. But to say "no, you have to do the work I want you to do" under the hypothesis that we have plenty of stuff to go around (and we absolutely do) is just sick.
I get fulfillment via work.
> Working less is the pretty much the only thing we should be putting energy into.
A life without purpose leads to sloth and early death.
Good for you. And I hope you never get laid off, burned out, or anything else.
I however do not get my fulfillment via work. I work to live, and I do [mostly] enjoy my work. However I have a very long todo list that I'm not getting done in part because I don't have the time to work on it (and in part because I don't have the money for the tools/parts I need)
Did you read the part where I said voluntary work is fine?
> A life without purpose leads to sloth and early death.
Almost no work provides the people doing it with a sense of purpose. People have a purpose in spite of work, not because of it.
The path to international air flight began with often suicidal attempts to flap our wings and act like birds, with many thinking we'd never go anywhere beyond that. With space we're already a bit more advanced, yet we're far from where we need to be - and the only way we're going to get there is by going out and starting on a very long journey.
We didn't do anything in 1969. Landing on the Moon and leaving a flag is like seeing the Wright Flyer go 260m, waving a Mission Accomplished banner, and then quitting with that as the state of art of flight - a mildly interesting novelty that was, at best, a proof of concept.
Gathering more resources so the overlords can have more humans enslaved with shinier golden handcuffs, who can consume more so number line goes up is not a meaningful goal to pursuit, and robotic-only commercially rationalized spaceflight has only this to offer.
Scientific discovery, so we can have better simulations about things of no use or effect on us? Why? Taking people to places and utilizing the resources there, and building a more resilient humanity is a worthy endeavor, and while robots are useful for that, ultimately human spaceflight (or interplanetary/interstellar travel) is he goal, not having only a space industry.
The Jamestown colony relied on shipments from England.
> Building a self-sustaining colony is so far outside the realm of possibility that it isn't worth thinking about
And look at what America became.
Very funny!
The Earth has more land than mankind will ever need. The Earth has effectively infinite energy from the Sun. And most of the resources we need are derived from biological matter, which Space lacks.
People don't realize how rapidly fertility affects populations. Take a place with a fertility rate of 1. That means each successive generation (which tends to be about 20 years, or the the window of fertility for a gen - from age ~20 to ~40) will decrease in size by half, in a compounding fashion. So over 1 century, that's a 97% decline (0.5^5) in generational size. Extinction comes shockingly fast.
But the opposite is also true. So what's going to happen is that low fertility populations are simply going to go extinct. That's going to be just lovely for humanity as it also corresponds with higher income, higher education, higher liberalism, higher secularism, and so on. And the current high fertility groups will come to quickly dominate the world. So it's kind of amusing in a way that Biblical texts will indeed come to pass - you'll have groups like Amish or Haredi, the meek - who happen to have high fertility rates, indeed inheriting the Earth.
This is part of the reason fertility is, by far, the biggest crisis facing humanity today. All love to the Amish and Haredi, but I don't want the Earth to turn into a planet of overalls and sidelocks. Even that would probably be just liminal, but we need some sort of high tech, high intelligence, high fertility sect to emerge. It's probably going to require something to akin to a modern religion, though presumably without a deity. Or maybe the Mormons had it right all along.
So, SpaceX?
I get it though. This is just how naturalism looks like when runs out of arguments in its favor.
"The Earth has more land than mankind will ever need."
"The Earth has effectively infinite energy from the Sun.
I see no exaggeration, obvious or otherwise. Scientific consensus is that mankind's population is going to peak in the next century.
> mankind already needs more land than Earth has
By what basis? There's no shortage of land. There's a shortage of land close to popular population centers, and that tends to be the land that people want to live on most. But that's an inherent geometric and social problem which outer space definitely doesn't solve, in fact it makes it worse.
> more energy than Earth can spare
Earth doesn't provide its own energy, the sun does. Even fossil fuels, biomass and wind power were all originally energy from the sun. The exception is nuclear - Earth does have an unusually high concentration of heavily elements like uranium and plutonium.
The bottleneck has always been development and delivery, not availability of energy itself. On just the land we currently use to grow corn for ethanol gasoline, we could build enough solar panels to power the entire US. And I certainly don't need to tell you about nuclear - the only reason entire civilizations aren't already powered by it is the time and expense and risk of building the plants.
What energy does outer space provide? You have solar, which we have here, and nuclear, which we have here. (You also have a variety of ideas that exist in science fiction but not the real world, like dyson spheres - I surely hope you aren't referring to such as the basis of your arguments.) None of this is new, and none of this solves the problems of development and delivery.
Love the (sorry, but greedy) take. Maybe we shouldn't expand infinitely. I don't see our species as that special. Maybe we should stay a bit modest, and errm, down to the earth in our ambitions.
Both humans and resources can't be in infinite number at the same time. Something can be infinite relative to other, and I like the current balance, thanks.
So again, it's a relativity, not a certainty.
...of a density so low that it is 0 on average.
space has practically infinite nothing.
A SciFi generation ship could maybe do that to the closest stars before it fails completely - but we have reason to think those stars will have any planet we can terraform. (ignoring the ethics if life exists - we don't have the technology to detect life on other planets)
Mars is the only planet that could potentially support human life. Even then the best parts are about as nice as Antarctica - not very nice. Which is to say a catastrophic failure of life support gives you seconds to get the backup [scuba type gear?] working as opposed to guaranteed death. Mars is a lot smaller than earth and has much less energy (less sun). Thus there isn't much potential there.
Everything else we can reasonably reach is much harder to work with than Mars.
Face it, earth is all we get: make it last.
Why? Because it is low-value land due to monsoons turning the dirt into mud, and that dirt doesn't have enough minerals in it so agriculture is too difficult to bother with.
It has free oxygen. It has 1g gravity. You can fly there for about a thousand dollars instead of a thousand billion. The radiation might give you skin cancer, but won't kill you immediately. There's too much water. It has animals you can hunt and eat. Etc, etc...
Practically nobody wants to live there that wasn't already there for generations.
If the human race can't be bothered occupying land like that, then colonising Mars is so, so far down the list it isn't even on the same page, book, or library shelf.
We're just starting an energetic space exploration with appearance of better tools in the recent years. Getting to the Moon is relatively easy, and could be barely done with much more modest technology; now we plan a bigger scale program. Getting people to Mars is undoubtedly more complex, but still within reach of the existing - or almost existing - technology. Getting furter from Earth, while not immediately in the plans, may get just as possible and useful with time, and we shouldn't claim to know what could be our reasons tomorrow to visit, say, Ceres or Venus. There is no scientific impossibility for flying almist anywhere in Solar system - the matter is only in needs and economic costs. Our predecessors could be confused with our habits of flying between continents and islands the way we can and do today - similarly some of us may not see the immediate reason to leave Earth - that can pass, as past habits got changed to our current ones.
Moon was that in 1960s. Now we're talking about a McMurdo station, not a dash to the South Pole with temporary storages along the way.
For the record, I would definitely visit such a hotel, even better if it included a super high altitude railway, Jungfrau Railway style!
I mean, I don't know you, but I feel like most people are not truly considering the level of discomfort, such a visit would entail. Much less being on the Moon or mars for any extended period of time.
The moon is unlikely to be self sustaining - gravity is too low. In turn that means that earth will forever be polluting the earths atmosphere (CO2!) to supply it.
The experiments done on ISS suggest that for optimum health a gravity of at least two thirds of that of Earth is necessary, which disqualifies almost all the bodies from the Solar System, because they are either too small or too big.
On a rotating spaceship it is possible to create any level of artificial gravity. In theory, one could make an underground rotating living space on Mars, to increase the apparent gravity, but that would consume much more energy and it would complicate entering and exiting, in comparison with a rotating spaceship.
Obviously, something like this will not be built any time soon, but nonetheless an expansion into the Solar System is possible even without living on the surfaces of other celestial bodies.
> Face it, earth is all we get: make it last.
Recent sci fi novels I've ready have been really depressing because while maybe some colony planet is doing OK the Earth is a used up husk, and I'd like to think that we could have both: a planet we chose to make last and successful footholds on other bodies (water moons and water planets make more sense to me)
[1] New York Times, 9 weeks before the Kitty Hawk's first flight (https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/svc/tmach/v1/refer?pdf=true...)
After we run out of space on the ocean I suppose it will make sense to consider space colonies, but I think you are really underestimating the technical challenges.
We don't even know if it's possible for actual life just simply life itself, to exist anywhere except on Earth for any length of time. We have exactly one example. Earth. All tests to the contrary in space show that life dies for all kinds of non-obvious reasons when removed from Earth for any extended period of time.
I personally hope it's not true and I do enthusiastically watch the progress. However, math is really, really bad.
Farside radio telescope:
https://www.colorado.edu/project/lunar-farside/
There is no reason the above cannot be maintained by robots, and many reasons it should be if we have it. We should also question if it is worth it.
Humans are going to walk on the fucking moon! How can you not be excited about that? There is value in pushing the frontier, in doing things at the limit of human technology, in seeing new worlds through human eyes.
Been there done that. Last happened in 1972, there is nothing exciting about it anymore. I have other things in my life that are exciting - things that really are exciting.
I just finished helping my local high school marching band's annual event - I got to hear a lot of great music which I find exciting.
I slept in the zoo next to the fishes with the girl scouts not long ago.
You can guess by the above the ages of my kids - which in turn implies a lot of other excitement.
There are plenty of other things as well. My local town art festival is exciting to a lot of people even though I didn't care enough to attend this year. There are a lot of museums, parks, concerts, ... in my local area to be exciting about. I have a shop full of tools for my various hobbies that I'm excited about. If you can't find a lifetime of things to be excited about withing walking distance of your bedroom you need to learn to enjoy your life more. (with apologies to the disabled who can't leave their bed)
Then again, that could be NASA trying to justify or make the best of a pointless program imposed on them by politicians.
An aside: Did anyone in the 1960s wonder at the bizarre choice of Apollo for a moon program? How is it that Artemis is still available as a program name?
The US put 5% of the federal budget into the original moon mission. NASA and SpaceX and the US Space Force combined don't spend anywhere close to that on R&D.
And even a few more that aren't even in our own solar system anymore...
What did we ultimately have to show for the money poured into Apollo? I'm a big fan of space exploration but putting twelve people up there for a few days at a time is pretty small potatoes compared to, say, the creation of smart phones or vast improvements in solar power and batteries or a thousand other things that have been done since 1972. I can push a (virtual) button on a rectangle I carry in my pocket and be instantly on a video call with my mother who lives a thousand miles away. And I don't even have to pay by the minute. That's positively magical, and in terms of actual real-world impact on average people it's far more significant than moon landings.
"Following the use of integrated circuit (IC) chips in the Interplanetary Monitoring Platform (IMP) in 1963, IC technology was later adopted for the AGC.[17] The Apollo flight computer was one of the first computers to use silicon IC chips.[4][8]"
A lot of money went to IC technology thanks to that, directly leading to the phones you mention. It is quite likely that without just these specific Apollo investments into ICs, we would be quite a few years behind on computer technology.
For starters, you are on HN amusing yourself in your free time.
We have immense computing power now compared to 50 years ago. But that doesn’t help to escape the gravity well of earth. We’re still using the same chemical rockets to go to space, haven’t invented any new type of rocket drives
(Unfortunately if you do launch from Earth, neighbors will likely by a bit annoyed).
And can then transition to more advanced stuff, like space resource extraction (so you can only launch important bits), launch loops/skyhooks/tether shenanigans in general, etc.
I mean until 1960 people expected to find whole civilisation or at least intelligent life on Venus and until 1964, at least some life on Mars. By then, it was too late to stop Apollo, but already no point to go anywhere else or expand Moon presence.
And this time, both countries are planning ambitious missions--not just flags-and-footprints, but bases and resource extraction (ice from the lunar south pole).
SpaceX Starship, the vehicle that will return to the moon, can carry 100 tons to the lunar surface--compared to less than 10 tons for Apollo. Moreover, whereas a single Saturn V launch cost almost a billion dollars to launch, Starship should cost a third the price. Effectively, we'll be able to deliver cargo to the moon for 1/30th the price of Apollo. That's real progress.
I've been following the space program since the 1970s and I have never been more excited about it.
I’m sure the technical challenges are much greater than how they are portrayed in the show. But certainly there has been a lack of will and optimism and imagination as well.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_missions_to_the_Moon#F...
I would argue that is something & that things are finally moving in the right direction for the Moon at a respectable pace. :)
I get the achievement here: it's quite difficult to combine data from these various sensors into one. Is the "AI" bit referring to how that integration was done?
I've put a couple of resources here for you. The first one described the program from a neutral perspective (in line with what you ask - grounded POV to satisfy paranoia): https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/moon-landing/
This one is for people a little further down the conspiracy pipeline, and it debunks the various things that moon landing conspiracists like to talk about: https://www.iop.org/explore-physics/moon/how-do-we-know-we-w...
Both are worth a read!
Finally this is an excellent jumping-off point to understand the Apollo program in more detail, once you're satisfied that it did happen (if you don't think so, you'll reject the source out of hand.) https://www.nasa.gov/the-apollo-program/
The program itself was really, really, really cool and is worth reading about. A truly enormous achievement involving millions of people and an entire country's scientific and engineering capacity.
https://apolloinrealtime.org/
I've listened through those flights few times and it still each time takes me back to memories still giving me goosebumps. Especially Apollo 11 when I was nine year old kid listening tiny battery radio all nights at our summer cottage attic.
It is a fantastic site.
The resolution is to realize that Apollo was a dead-end stunt, not some universe-altering historical event. The lack of consequences was an inevitable result of the structure of what Apollo was.
Then all that went out the airlock & the whole thing devolved into a long-term unsustainable race. :P
It ended up that the government-contractor axis wasn't able to reduce launch costs, not due to technical reason, but political and institutional ones. There had to be a different approach, as pursued by SpaceX.
But then as time pressure set in & money was suddenly not a problem, all that went to the wayside. And by the time Apollo was over, it seems the mindset that rockets are expensive and expandable set in. If it was just inertia or also business interests of the by then entrenched launcher contractors is hard to tell.
We haven't gone again since because there's not much point to it. The US spent an amount of money equivalent to about 10 Manhattan Projects to ultimately put a dozen people on the moon for a cumulative total of somewhat less than one person-month. There was no military utility to it, no commercial benefit, just some science and exploration. Once you've done that a few times, what's the impetus to continue?
The technology was so bleeding-edge that each mission required a huge amount of bespoke manufacturing that got thrown away after a single use, and massive teams of people to run everything, such that each individual mission still cost billions of inflation-adjusted dollars. The American public's stomach for spending such vast sums of money just didn't last. Imagine if you needed to build and throw away an entire Airbus A380 to reach the summit of Mt. Everest. Maybe it would have been summited a few times to show it could be done, but we probably wouldn't keep doing it.
As a result a space race with the Soviets developed, resulting in the USA winning & Soviets loosing - at a price. The Apollo hardware was a racing hardware, like a race car, build to win a race and little more. As a result, the whole program was horrendously expensive to run & it was politically unworkable to continue running it once a victory in the space race has been achieved.
There was no shortage of people calling to continue not just with Moon but space exploration & industrialization in general (with a good example being Gerard O'Neill - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerard_K._O%27Neill#Space_colo...). But they could never get the beancounters & shortsighted politicians to allocate the necessary costs to get things going.
What I think changed is both the technology finally getting cheap enough that more entities can finally get involved without begging a government for a massive budget, because launcher reuse was demonstrated and even just because a bunch of very rich people who like space got involved & can do it themselves without depending on others.
Going back into space will require doing so with a hard nosed commercial mindset. Things on that scale are done because they are profitable, not because of putatively higher minded considerations.
I think our collective spirit is in the best place it's ever been for actually going into space, it's just not the spirit you were probably imagining.
The people building the road to space aren't spending time on your concerns. What you should expect is that whatever spiritual future lays ahead of us, for better or worse, will come from them: they will not wait for you to provide whatever it is you have in mind. Their minds are filled by dreams and plans of unlimited real-estate, unlimited energy and unlimited wealth.
* The Lunacy of Artemis – https://idlewords.com/2024/5/the_lunacy_of_artemis.htm
* Artemis II Is Not Safe to Fly – https://idlewords.com/2026/03/artemis_ii_is_not_safe_to_fly....
"Removing these 50 objects from orbit would cut danger from space junk in half" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45469259 :
> When will it be safe and cost-efficient to - instead of deorbiting toward Earth's atmosphere - Capture and Haul and Rendezvous and gently Land orbital scrap on non-earth locations like the Moon or Mars or a thrust-retrofitted asteroid for later processing?
Is there any amount of time in a higher altitude orbit - or an Earth-Moon lunar cycler orbit - that would sanitize the outer surface of a spacecraft like ISS? Or will all such attempts cause adaptation?
Would ISS be more useful as an oxygen tank in earth-moon orbit than in Earth's atmosphere and ocean?
But for the moon,
From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45237426 :
> What about solar sintering + induction heating of lunar regolith?
> Basalt, Glass,
> Molten oxide electrolysis of regolith would yield Oxygen, Silicon, Iron, Aluminum, and Titanium for 3d printing and for solar panels and semiconductors.
> Is there a sensor for inside of a rover or a vehicle wheel to sample the regolith falling within the wheel before it pours out to self clear?
Does this model include a regolith map or a soil map? Where is there Carbon on the moon?
---
"Lunar soil machine developed to build bricks using sunlight" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45086238
---
From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42543663 :
> I wonder if the ISS could instead be scrapped to the moon. [...]
> Because of my love for old kitchens on the Moon.
---
"Researchers simulated 30 million routes to the Moon and found a hidden detour through L1 that saves fuel and keeps spacecraft talking to Earth the whole way" https://spacedaily.com/sd-researchers-simulated-30-million-r... :
> Most of a deep-space journey is coasting along gravitational contours that physicists collectively call the Interplanetary Transport Network — a web of low-energy pathways that connect orbits around planets, moons and Lagrange points
- "Earth–Moon transfer via the L1 Lagrangian point using the theory of functional connections" (2026) https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s42064-025-0297-x :
> The results show a reduced fuel consumption of at least 58.80 m/s as compared to the literature. This difference can be useful for mission designers, while the efficiency of the technique can potentially extend the results to other types of transfers in space.
Where are the L1 and L2 Lagrangian points when you consider the mass of the moon in addition to the earth and the sun?
Lyapunov exponents in SQG/DDF too. This month I've been learning about the differences between SQG and DDF Dilatant Dark Fluid (Fedi) in regards to n-body gravity research.