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bookers555 t1_je783mo wrote

Reply to comment by Glittering-Jello-935 in We Need to Get Back to the Moon by Guy_PCS

Maybe not in our lifetimes, but expansion into space is inevitable, all that's stopping us is costs, and those have been going down for a long while now.

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Glittering-Jello-935 t1_je7zsac wrote

There's next to nothing there aside from iron, silicon and magnesium. Any human who lives there will have, at best, the quality of a life of a submarine crewman. You may be able to find enough resources to support a small number of people, but their lives are going to suck and more than likely will never be able to return home due to the deterioration of their bones and musculature. And that's only the things we already know about, no one knows what the long term affect of exposure to the lunar soli will do to people (and machines).

There is nothing to do there that is worth the horrible lives these people will lead that could not more easily be done by robots

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Glittering-Jello-935 t1_je8004p wrote

The desire to live on the moon is no more that romanticism

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bookers555 t1_je89go6 wrote

And utilitarian, the Moon is a gateway to the rest of the Solar system. Even the Apollo LM descent stage reached orbit on its own in one stage. Now imagine rockets launched from the Moon, how far they could go without having to be completely spent just on getting a spacecraft into orbit like when launched from Earth. We wouldnt even need rockets even aside from the ones taking people to the Moon in the first place.

Living on the Moon wouldnt exactly be a vacation by all means, it would be just like the astronauts on the ISS, people living a strange and at times uncomfortable life for the sake of human progress.

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Glittering-Jello-935 t1_je8bpih wrote

Assuming your scenario works, a connecting flight spaceport on the moon, it would still be better to use to robots. From the point of view of mass regularly required to be sent from earth to keep people alivee

Also: if you have the technology to do manned flight to the outer solar system, and why you would I can't fathom, it's a 100x more difficult problem than going to the moon, with far less payoff, you likely have the technology to bypass the extra gravity well as a needless waste.

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bookers555 t1_je8du29 wrote

That depends on how advanced we can make those robots, even the most advanced robots today are very clunky, and this base could be built within a decade.

Look at Mars rovers, it takes them months to do what a human could do in 20 minutes with a shovel and a microscope.

Plus there's the fact that if we can mantain a crewed base on the Moon we would gain invaluable experience on just how to mantain people in other worlds. Mars itself isnt fit for practice given that its a 9 month trip with current tech.

The ISS could have also been a crew less station, and yet we put people there to not just make everything way smoother than machines can do, but also to learn about the effect space has on the human body.

Also, this is specifically go to nearby planets. Launching from the Moon would make a Mars landing far more feasible since you are going to need the rocket itself to leave Mars, plus help shorten a trip thats already uncomfortably long.

The outer Solar system is going to requiere newer tech, but launching from the Moon will help.

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Glittering-Jello-935 t1_je9u1v7 wrote

How exactly would launching from the moon make it easier to launch to Mars? Everything that you put on the moon had already been launched from Earth. And in particular, how would having to land on another planetary body, one not far from Earth with it's own gravity and much faster revolution period, make a trip to Mars faster?

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CaypoH t1_je95vnb wrote

Do they only sell gravity generators at the fancy store? Or are you talking about the costs in human health and lives? We are maybe closing in on having a workable solution to the radiation problem. We are nowhere near solving gravity and nutrition problems.

I don't want to sound pessimistic, but suggesting that humans will full-time live away from Earth is on the level of "nuclear reactor in every car".

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bookers555 t1_je972dq wrote

>Do they only sell gravity generators at the fancy store?

No, but we can research and develop it, the only thing preventing tech from existing is lack of political will and money.

When there's both, you can do things like landing on the Moon when only 20 years before your most advanced aircraft still used propellers.

If the government wanted it we could have even landed on Mars back in the 70s, NASA in fact had a plan for it completely laid out by the late 60s, and even other things like a crewed Venus flyby, all before the Moon landing, but achieving this would have required not slashing their budget into a fraction of what it was during the Apollo program.

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CaypoH t1_je97yba wrote

Sure. And holodeck with replicators are right around the corner. Do you know how science works? Do you think it's just throwing money at people in lab coats until they give you what you want?

Having a plan is very different from being able to even test its viability, let alone execute it. Right now delivering relatively small inanimate objects to Mars intact is a gamble. And it's telling that the often cited greatest hope of human endeavor in space is a company owned by a mentally unstable conman.

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bookers555 t1_je99uty wrote

I do, and I know that without funding and a powerful entity with an interest to see something happen you won't achieve much when there's no direct economic gain.

You yourself mentioned SpaceX and their rockets as the "greatest hope for space travel", and yet back in the 90s you had things like the Delta Clipper that, with proper funding and time, could have delivered decades ago what Starship has yet to achieve.

Or what about the VentureStar, an SSTO spaceplane that was, according to Lockheed's engineers, 95% complete, and it was a spacecraft that would have achieved what Falcon 9 does but even cheaper and only needed a few years more of research to solve it's final issues, and yet it got cancelled because the government has no idea of what they are doing.

Or what about nuclear rockets, something that NASA is working on and says will have one ready to test in 2027, even though NASA had been doing some very promising work on this back in the 70s, and got cancelled because the government told them to focus on the Space Shuttles instead.

Absolutely nothing of what we use right now for space travel is cutting edge technology, we just have what the government is willing to afford, which isn't much, and when it is willing to spend money they completely waste it anyway.

Just look at the SLS, 10 years of development and dozens of billions spent to end up with a rocket no more powerful than the more than half a century old Saturn V and powered by 40 year old engines, which launches the Orion spacecraft, yet another capsule that isn't much more advanced than the Apollo CSM.

If we don't have the tech to achieve all of this is because the government doesn't have a legitimate interest, and because they are just too damn incompetent to fund the right people and let them work. And that's how you end up with a company owned by a mentally unstable conman leading the charge in space travel, because everyone else is too busy feasting on their own snot.

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