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

Days for the moon, months rather than years for Mars, and we've already had people on space stations for that kind of duration. 3 years for the Jovian system which is a step up but not a huge one.

> Furthermore no matter what planet you would want to explore you would need a space station to explore from.

I don't see that at all. Unmanned satellites would make sense, but the surface (or possibly an aerostat for some planemos) is always going to be a much more human-friendly environment in terms of gravity and radiation shielding.

> It will also be the best way start the exploration as you can use your knowledge from the space station we have on earth.

This is circular reasoning.

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

Which is why the moon makes sense as a next step. It's challenging but doable.

Days versus hours - exactly. A step up in risk, to be sure, but not a huge one - realistically there aren't so many problems that won't kill you in the hours it would take to get home from the ISS but will kill you in the days it would take you to get home from the moon.

> Again we don't even have the technology to make mining the moon, if it had anything of value, profitable.

Space stations aren't profitable either. It's not about profit, it's about humanity spreading through the cosmos.

> You are missing the point. They don't have to be manned they are hubs between the planet and the surface and back home. They provide important information about the planet to those who live on it.

So how does a manned space station help with that? We already have satellites orbiting Mars and acting as communications relays.

> Has nothing to do with circular reasoning not sure you understand that word then.

"Knowledge of space stations will be valuable because we will build space stations because that will let us reuse our knowledge of space stations" is textbook circular reasoning.

> No, it doesn't make sense as there is no benefit compared to the cost. We simply aren't there yet no matter how lovely it sounds.

So how do we get to there from here? I don't think we'll ever get to a point where going to other planemos makes sense from a corporate profit-and-loss perspective, not if we don't go there for non-economic reasons first.

Suppose the goal is Mars, or one of the Jovian moons, or Titan. How would an ISS 2.0 put us any closer to getting there than we are now? What is it that we can't do now that we would want to test out with an ISS 2.0?

We're going to need surface habitats on these places, and building a surface habitat on the moon would let us test out the technologies and engineering that needs, in a place that's - relatively speaking - much quicker to get to and from, so safer and easier to iterate on. While a space station tells us some things that are relevant to building surface habitats, most of the things it tells us are only relevant to space stations. I simply don't see the need for long-term-manned space stations, and medium-term-manned space stations we can do already.

This never works... People need to be forced into developing solution by creating more problems while solving existing one. Like "shit, the mars colony got wiped out by a diseases, no more humans to repair the stuff there, quick, figure out how to make robots that make more robots themselves, nothing else fits the budget". Or "shit, we underestimated the effects or magnitude of cosmic radiation on colonists, gotta accelerate work on those cures for cancer or we're fucked".

And "alternative priority" things like AI or, dunno, cancer-research, will never compete for the same money bucket as space exploration. They'll likely end up receiving significantly more money since space exploration will just increase their value by orders of magnitude. Economy is never a zero some game like "spend money on this vs. that" if you play it on a large enough scale since most stuff is either in excess of "creatable". Only real finite resource is "space you can practically reach to fast enough". Too bad some people have started to actually believe the made up rules of our "economy game".

Hmmm... now that I think about it, maybe our "economical game" is the problem: we've developed it so much, with manufactured needs and manufactured scarcities for the purpose of "hacking people into working the hardest they can", but now it's kind of turned against us. Maybe we need some serious rewrite of the code of global economy to start making the things that are technically possible actually possible...