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This comment shows what enormous damage belief in manned, extra-orbital space visits does to us (us = humans, life on Earth). Of course I'm going to take downvotes for saying this, so I'll ask gullible readers one question: what ^ ^evidence^ ^ have you seen that proved such extraordinary events took place anywhere other than on your screens?
You seriously believe that?
Instead of putting Men and Women on Moon or Mars or Jupiter's Moon, how about the new mission be "create environment for 100 spaceX like companies to thrive" I reject the premise that government should be creating these missions or setting these big audacious goals
Earlier quoted context omitted.
As a non-american I still think that climate change is the wrong problem for the US to focus on, and space exploration and colonization goals are better targets. The US has a huge concentration of wealth and brainpower. Neither of those are what's need to solve climate change. You'd need an army of Mahatma Gandhis and the new breed of "social entrepreneurs", not of Einsteins and Oppenheimers. And you know, that conce…
I couldn't disagree with you more. New Einsteins and Oppenheimers are precisely what's needed to fight climate change. "Social enterpreneurs" will do jack squat, other than make people feel better. The only way to actually beat climate change is to improve the relevant technology to the point where the route to high standard of living is cheaper to do with clean tech. Constantly reducing the cost of solar power, and…
You could be right on this. It's probably more about changing politics and rerouting billions and billions, not something doable grass-roots style. But...
Most of the clean-power tech is here now and it works (maybe it needs lots of incremental tweaks, but no breakthroughs), if you just fix the broken economy around it. The price of oil or rare metals shouldn't be artificially lowered just because the big guys found a way to externalize the environmental costs out of it or because it makes sense in a twisted geopolitical way! A plastic cup should fucking cost $10 if it has to and if you can't afford it then buy a reusable glass or metal one. A damn next-gen smartphone should cost $1000 if it this is what it has to cost for the constituents of its battery to be mined in an eco-friendly way.
We're trying to use technology to fix a broken economy and broken world-politics. And it might work!
But think of the opportunity cost of doing this: all the great minds working to shave off an extra cent from solar panel assembly tech could work on basic nanotech research of medical research or ai or space travel. And the advances from these fields could then, maybe, be backported to the solar panel assembly process to make it 1 cent cheaper.
Yeah it probably kind of works this way too, with advances in basic science and tech driven by research directly applicable to clean energy, then later applied to things like space exploration.
But... it just feels totally backwards to me!
Science should be driven by whatever stimulates people's curiosity, whatever makes them dream higher, then later applied to practical problems. Oh, and economy should never be "tweaked" to work in unnatural ways and then later fixed through technology. This feels just wrong and I'm sure (hope? :) ) a disaster will sooner or later come out of it.
Disagreeable as he might be, I kind of like Mr. Trump ideas... though I wouldn't bet they'll translate into anything that works.
Human presence was needed in 1960ties, not in 2020.
Agree completely that our space program needs a new significant mission to stay relevant. However, I don't think going to space matters as much as it did last century. During JFK's reign catching up in space with the soviets was more than about going to space, it was about being able to defend the country. Today I think our new Moon Mission should be about solving climate change. That's an issue the country and world…
Earth always has been, and in all likelihood will forever be, screwed up. Climate change will never be solved until (to paraphrase a quip from memory) global inequity has been evened out to a level a Pakistani brickmaker would consider prosperity. I don't see countries with higher standards of living making those sacrifices for the greater good of our planet. I'd sleep much better betting our species on space expansi…
Agreed. Not only screwed up, but screwed up in multiple ways. Throwing more money at the dozens of money sinks here does nothing to significantly help ensure our long-term survival. It might be the right thing to do, and over time continuing to do things like this may mean that mankind enters into some new wondrous universe free from pain and suffering. But right now, right here? We need an insurance policy. We need to get the hell off this ball of mud.
Want to know why the space program never went anywhere? Because back in the 60s and 70s, people said exactly the same thing "We need to spend our money on earthbound problems"
We've spent trillions on those problems. They are still here. In fact, the places we've made the most progress are the places we didn't try to fix.
I'm not in favor of a new huge national mission. I think a huge national goal to decrease LEO launch costs by 99.9% or more would be worth spending tens or hundreds of billions of dollars on. But heck, if we narrowed our focus to just that, we could probably get it done a lot cheaper than if we went down the mission creep road again.
This comment shows what enormous damage belief in manned, extra-orbital space visits does to us (us = humans, life on Earth). Of course I'm going to take downvotes for saying this, so I'll ask gullible readers one question: what ^ ^evidence^ ^ have you seen that proved such extraordinary events took place anywhere other than on your screens?
The amount of money that could be saved by performing lithography in the vacume provided by space would be enormious. Too bad the cost of geting up there is also... well... enormious.
I'd think space would be, relatively, filthy for lithography. Maybe depends where.
An intense dedicated national effort toward the goal of a fusion power plant is one possibility.
This comment shows what enormous damage belief in manned, extra-orbital space visits does to us (us = humans, life on Earth). Of course I'm going to take downvotes for saying this, so I'll ask gullible readers one question: what ^ ^evidence^ ^ have you seen that proved such extraordinary events took place anywhere other than on your screens?
What evidence would you accept?
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As for the only other ^^evidence^^ offered so far (Taniwha, thank you), unmanned rockets have already put mirrors on the moon that still work today, see Lunokhod 2. If you say the astronauts took pictures of theirs, where are the stars?