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If We Can Put a Man on the Moon, Why Can’t We Put a Man on the Moon?

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Re: If We Can Put a Man on the Moon, Why Can’t We Put a Man on the Moon?

#201

Post by bonesss »

mcguire wrote: post #174
bonesss wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We can make [oxygen from moon rocks]( https://phys.org/news/2009-08-scientists-oxygen-moon.html ). There is [water on the moon]( https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/Mini-RF/multimedia/featur... ). With oxygen, water, and power, we can make food. Appropriate radiation shielding is a matter of construction, which could occur on the moon itself using local materials ideally, or building underground enough to be shielded.…

We are going to need a POC for that. Here's a rock, there's ice in Alaska; go survive. Oh, and you have to do it with mittens on. Good luck!

Show me the infinity He-3 and Mega-Billions in platinum I can make in an exclusive environment mankind is obligated to conquer on the timeline of a few short hundred years and I will show you some Multi-Billionaires willing to invest heavily as soon as the intersection of orbital access and autonomous robotics is potent enough to mine the crap our of that, and any other, 'Alaska'... Some imagine it will be many decades [never done those before!], until it's cost viable and some imagine 2020 or 2025 [0].

And I think my vision, and Elon Musks, has something more like autonomous driven lunar vehicles powered by machine learning and mesh networks for robust exploration. Like... 15 Teslas talking over wifi but with no traffic, no time limits, no pedestrians, no speed limits or laws against having jump rockets...

I totally agree we have to build PoCs, and test new equipment, and do science, and do engineering. But most of the "hard parts" WRT to survival have been done on earth [for a poor ROI on earth!], and the really hard parts WRT time differentials and manufacturing look very much like self driving cars and robots made for the moon or mars. Teslas and Foxconn, friend. Europa is just... what we do every day in Subsea exploration + what we do every day with our _amazing_ rover program.

I'm not saying we're there tomorrow. I'm saying that if our robots are there next week making oxygen generators and water pumps and harvesting and collecting, with steady resupplies of better robots and smarter factories, we could Kerbal ourselves f-ing far. H2O is rocket fuel - pure delta-v. Independent mining robots could extract the raw ore for our Expanse/BSG-ish space fleets over the next hundred years, and your grandkids could figure out how to spend an asteroids belt worth of mineral fortune :)

There are many Billions being spent on this pursuit today, in 2018. Cynicism aside, sometimes the VCs know a thing or two...

-

[0] - https://www.inverse.com/article/33556-asteroid-mining-multi-...

Re: If We Can Put a Man on the Moon, Why Can’t We Put a Man on the Moon?

#202

Post by classicsnoot »

cryptoz wrote: post #110
valuearb wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Calling this a republican problem is being willfully ignorant of the problems in our government structure. We didn’t get $21B in debt cause of republicans, or democrats, but because of congress. Congress directed NASA to spend $20B to build the SLS, a super heavy launch system built by congresses favorite contractors. It won’t be reusable at all, ever launch rocket will be burned up in the atmosphere. Each launch wil…

The problems being discussed here happen at least 2 orders of magnitude larger than you are talking about. The little NASA journey to SLS has effectively no impact on the grander US government debt or the issues causing it. The issues causing the debt are much much bigger problems that last centuries and are largely Republican-driven. They are things like overspending on War, keeping the poor population poor (war on…

>war spending There is no innocent party in terms of war making. This is documented historical fact. If anything, Democrats have taken the country to war more than republicans, but it is a largely irrelevant factoid. I am a bit confused at what you mean by "over spend" on war. I think the real issue is that these recent "wars" are actually just very large and powerful Police Actions. I am not making this distinction for political reasons, but rather to highlight the spending and tolerance of the nations that commit Police Actions. A War has existential effects on the participants. A police action tends to be very one sided. The US can, and indeed does, engage in conflicts in Africa, Central Asia, and South East Asia simultaneously, all while maintaining a robust, defensive army (it is more accurately in offensive army on a leash, but near as makes no difference). This is not War in a Clausewitsian interpretation of war. It is war in terms of its effects on the recipients of the Police Action; a war that cannot be won. Currently, the US war on terror is doing all the heavy lifting that the UN, by its founding document and principles, should be doing, but the US frames it as National Interest. This kind of codifies Exceptionalism (City on a Hill) and suddenly makes War a national line item expense. In any case, the debt is not caused by war, the current wars or the past wars. Our society in its composition and structure is unsustainable, and this incurs unreasonable amounts of debt. A simple g! search of US federal budget (both discretionary and mandatory) will show that the most expensive thing America does is exist.

>republicans aliens dude meme We have gone 8 + 8 + 8 with 16 of those being Democrat president and ~10 of those being Left controlled congress. As you put it, the problems are large and structural, and the idea that the fault lies with one party, regardless of their actual hold on power, is preposterous in a deliciously propagandistic way. The War on Poverty, an abject failure, was started by a Democrat. The EPA was started by a Republican. The military industrial complex was basically instituted as well as exposed by the same guy, a Republican who came from a traditionally Democrat organization. Arguably the most ardent leftist president held power for more than 12 years, fundamentally changed the nature of commerce, raised a massive army, and freedom'd the shit out of half the globe. If you only see republicans as the problem, then you are going to generate a narrative that ignores many relevant factors. Just my .02

Edited for spelling and format.

Re: If We Can Put a Man on the Moon, Why Can’t We Put a Man on the Moon?

#203

Post by kraig911 »

chrisatumd wrote: post #162
kraig911 wrote: post #128

Maybe we realize now going to the moon from a financial standpoint is purely political. If there was a efficient way and industrial need for plenty of resources from the moon maybe they'd make it possible. But right now grandiose measures of showing off your countries genitals kind of creates a narrative of wasted resources to me right now. I've heard the argument that spending on stuff like this creates jobs and eco…

This letter gets posted time to time. Definitely one of my favorites for explaining the rationale on spending money pushing boundaries when there are plenty of things that money can do to help people in need now. http://www.lettersofnote.com/2012/08/why-explore-space.html

Investing in space exploration is necessary and all I don't disagree. But saying it adds to the economy as much as investing in people who need investment I can't necessarily equate. There's millions of children's not getting an adequate education, and there's millions of people hungry and starved. In our current society; investment only happens when there's a vacuum of opportunity that could be filled. Only governments seem to invest in people right now. In a space faring society education is necessary. We don't have enough highly trained workers as is without space ships. We need investment and radical change in education.

Re: If We Can Put a Man on the Moon, Why Can’t We Put a Man on the Moon?

#204

Post by gozur88 »

solatic wrote: post #25
gozur88 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Doing anything ambitious in space would require a lot of material, which has limited our ambitions since the 1970s. We go to the moon because materials are cheap because... we want to build what?

That's like going back to the 17th century and decrying the exploration of the New World because you're not certain just how much gold there may be and you can't predict what the New World economy might look like. Barring drastic efficiency increases in launch technology (to a Star Wars style level of ease) a lunar base is essential to enabling a space economy not suffocated by heavy shipping and transaction costs in…

>That's like going back to the 17th century and decrying the exploration of the New World because you're not certain just how much gold there may be and you can't predict what the New World economy might look like.

No it isn't. Exploration of the new world offered obvious substantive benefits - the trees alone were priceless to a countries that had to manage forests very carefully, not to mention new and useful crops coupled with an abundance of land. In short, it was a no-brainer.

And it was extremely cheap compared to building space infrastructure, since food could be grown or purchased from the natives, there was air, sunburn was the only radiation problem.

In space we'll have none of that. There are unsettled regions on earth far more hospitable to human life than anything we'll find outside our gravity well. The idea we ought to sink trillions of dollars into and infrastructure to produce things that are already good enough is hard to justify.

Re: If We Can Put a Man on the Moon, Why Can’t We Put a Man on the Moon?

#205

Post by dkonofalski »

mcguire wrote: post #178
dkonofalski wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ProTip™️: Copy and paste the headline of the article into Google to get the full article. I really need to write a Chrome extension for this but haven't had the time. :(

Didn't that stop working recently? Or was that the NYT?

It worked for me to read the rest of the article so it might be NYT that you're thinking of.

PS. You may have to do the search in incognito mode as it might log a cookie that you've visited the page already.

Re: If We Can Put a Man on the Moon, Why Can’t We Put a Man on the Moon?

#206

Post by [deleted] »

indubitable wrote: post #94

The article answers itself: "NASA’s traditional manned programs for deep space exploration, costing well over $3 billion annually, continue to enjoy solid bipartisan backing among lawmakers and major agency contractors." That quote is speaking largely of the SLS. It's supposed to essentially be the Space Shuttle 2.0, but it's often just referred to as the Senate Launch System for good reason. We've spending billions…

[deleted]

Re: If We Can Put a Man on the Moon, Why Can’t We Put a Man on the Moon?

#208

Post by ThomPete »

lmm wrote: post #189
ThomPete wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I don't think that follows at all, because I think engineering at 2g or 0.5g or even 0.01g has a lot more in common with engineering at 1g or 0.15g than it does with engineering at 0g. Zero-g is qualitatively very different from non-zero g; stuff like room design, plumbing, HVAC, material constraints (the need to avoid things that can powder) are totally different." Those are mostly things that can be explored on ea…

> Those are mostly things that can be explored on earth, no need to build a moonbase to figure that out. > The opportunity with a space station is to figure out things that can't be explored realistically in other environments. The best way to explore the things we're going to need to live on other planemos is to live on another planemo. A space station involves solving a bunch of engineering challenges that are diff…

It's simply not true.

No matter what planet you need to go to you need to spend a lot of time in space. Furthermore no matter what planet you would want to explore you would need a space station to explore from. It will also be the best way start the exploration as you can use your knowledge from the space station we have on earth.

So no matter how you look at it, in space in zero-g is going to be the majority of the endeavour.

Furthermore, we are simply not even close to be able to live realistically far from earth let alone able to afford it.

There are so many things that need to be established before it becomes realistically sustainable and safe.

Re: If We Can Put a Man on the Moon, Why Can’t We Put a Man on the Moon?

#209

Post by deanCommie »

smitherfield wrote: post #111
zmk_ wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Welcome to the Netherlands then. Most people ride trains between the cities. It does help, however, that most of the population lives in cities that are 30-40 minutes away on a train.

The Netherlands is approximately the same land area and population density as the NYC metropolitan area[1], so it is (as you say) a very different environment from the entire US or even Spain. [1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/72/NY...

That's a bit of an exaggeration. Here are the areas overlaid: https://imgur.com/a/s9pq7

It's more like the area from New York to Boston

Re: If We Can Put a Man on the Moon, Why Can’t We Put a Man on the Moon?

#210

Post by badminton1 »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #79
badminton1 wrote: post #19

Because the Apollo Program happened during Bretton Woods, a period of time where America had virtually infinite money. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bretton_Woods_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exorbitant_privilege#Oppositio...

> Because the Apollo Program happened during Bretton Woods We are still under the Bretton Woods system, more or less. Almost 2/3rds of foreign currency reserves held by central banks are held in U.S. dollars [1]. If anything, real interest rates are lower today than they were in the 1960s. [1] http://www.imf.org/en/News/Articles/2017/03/31/pr17108-IMF-R...

Yes but the US does not allow audits on their gold reserves.

They could print as many dollar bills they wanted until the Nixon shock.

That ended, and as a consequence the economy is not doing as well right now.

If not but because of exclusive deals (e.g: oil) it would be very hard to justify the dollar current value.

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