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As a former Intuitive Machines employee, I feel obligated to correct the title! IM-1 landed on the moon last February and although it didn't stay upright, it was still operational and returned some decent scientific data.
It was flipped upside-down like a Turtle?
Hell yeah! It would be very cool if we are able to properly colonize the moon in my lifetime. Even if we don't have humans living there like in Futurama (as cool as that would be), it would be unbelievably cool if we have constant back-and-forth trips to the moon. Or we could just blow it up, which might be fun in its own right: https://youtu.be/GTJ3LIA5LmA
Mr Show has held up well, maybe even gotten better with time.
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insert flat-moon comment here
Why are the interiors of the craters uniformly deep?
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It's fascinating how the pictures have that "Apollo moon landing" look. I'd always assumed that a huge part of this was just 1960s technology (film not digital etc), but apparently it's actually coming from the literally unearthly lighting conditions of being on the Moon.
I am no expert, but to my knowledge the space flight tech evolves very slowly, if at all. One reason for that is that modern tech is supposedly too sensitive to radiation. So you want to balance what's worthwhile to upgrade, and fancy videos are probably low on that list.
Hell yeah! It would be very cool if we are able to properly colonize the moon in my lifetime. Even if we don't have humans living there like in Futurama (as cool as that would be), it would be unbelievably cool if we have constant back-and-forth trips to the moon. Or we could just blow it up, which might be fun in its own right: https://youtu.be/GTJ3LIA5LmA
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There is no reason for humans to ever return to the moon. The cost and risks are not justified. Drones and robots can do anything that needs to be done. They don’t need to breathe, they don’t need to sleep, or eat.
I think it would be cool, and I don't know that I care if there's a "reason" to do it other than "human achievement". I mean, there wasn't really a "reason" to go to the moon in the 60's either. I think I more or less agree with JFK on this: "Many years ago the great British explorer George Mallory, who was to die on Mount Everest, was asked why did he want to climb it. He said, 'Because it is there'. Well, space is…
Today people still do it, but it means nothing to anyone other than those people.
Going to the moon in the 60s was an impressive feat. It pushed the boundary forward. But that's all it did. There's literally nothing of value there.
Sure most of the people who saw that are dead, or will be in the next 20 years. So it will seem "cool" to the next generation. But selling "cool" to a congressional appropriations committee is a tough sell.
We aren't gonna colonize the moon (or indeed mars) because frankly it would be too expensive, and there's no point. There literally is nothing to gain from a colony in either place, and there's no way to fund it (and no reason to fund it.)
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Thank you for seeing through my sloppy writing, and identifying what I was getting at. I should have have said "aside from human intervention." So, aside from the human intervention, and assuming that the materials can generally withstand radiation... let's say it's 6 sq meters, [0] I know this is not exactly how it works, but if LLMs[1] and my own lacking skills at mathematics are accurate, then ~70 million years? T…
Water in concert with temperature flux is really destructive causing a massive amount of erosion here on Earth. With that said thermal cycles on the moon are very large, with a range up to 450F. That much thermal expansion and contraction over time is going to be hard on anything not shielded under some soil.
How many cycles would it take to turn into a mound? Would a coherent mound still count as "existing?"
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It's now within reach for a medium sized corporation, largely ignored by humankind. That's huge progress!
It's not any more or less out of reach for a medium-sized corporation than it's been since the 70s. The reason no corporation has gone is that there's no economic incentives to. And there's still not; this is a NASA mission, it's exploratory science funded by the public.
This is excellent news. Private sector companies are going into space, landing on extraterrestrial bodies. Hope this spur more activities outward.