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Comment by smdz | Hacker News Reader

I've always wondered why the US never went back to the moon. Or never set up a moon base for space exploration and experimentation.

Even when countries like China and India are making attempts to mine the moon for Helium - why don't we hear such stories from the US? If it makes sense for China and India, it probably does make sense for US too. Or do the US elites know something much more fundamental and powerful that we might never hear of until the next world-war?

I don't like the controversy theories, especially about aliens, but I don't like the arguments against the controversy theories either. I don't know if aliens exist and even if they existed and visited us few decades back, I believe they would disregard us as a sub-Type 0 civilization (like Michio Kaku categorizes). They would have found us similar to primitives - studied us and left.

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>I've always wondered why the US never went back to the moon. Or never set up a moon base for space exploration and experimentation.

The US sent half a dozen crewed missions to the moon, and made numerous unmanned missions.

There's no dark secret - space travel is complex and expensive, travel to the moon vastly more so than simply to orbit, and money is governed by politics. When the US had the prestige of possibly beating the Soviets to the moon , there was the political and popular will to do so. But eventually, the trick simply got old, and no longer seemed worth the expense.

Now take that, and add the exponential long term cost of a habitat and mining operation on the moon with 1970's / 1980's dollars and tech. I remember there being numerous plans for a moonbase at the time, it was discussed by NASA often, but the thing is, no one could figure out how to actually make it work reasonably cheaply without seeming like a lavish and pointless boondoggle to Congress.

I find it odd that in the 60s it was deemed affordable, but during the 2 decades of boomer super cycle, the female migration to the workforce, and spending money now which our grandchildrens grandchildren will be repaying... we could ill afford it.

It wasn't considered to be worth the cost, that's not entirely the same as not being affordable. The US wanted to focus on the Shuttle, satellite reconnaissance and Star Wars.

and ISS and unmanned probes.

The ISS is a good example of this phenomenon - it was going to be "Space Station Freedom[0]" before it became the "International Space Station" because budget cuts made the original plans no longer feasible.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Station_Freedom

Also the sudden collapse of the Soviet Union, which presented both an unexpected opportunity and a risk. Opportunity in that Russia was no longer the enemy and could be a partner with experience running space stations. Risk in that Russia was not going to spend as much on space by themselves as the Soviet Union did, and their rocket engineers might have been tempted to go work for Iran, North Korea or other countries with nuclear ambitions. By doing the ISS together with Russia, those engineers were kept employed.

You're missing something important: back in those days, we didn't have to funnel all our wealth to a small number of billionaires (in fact, the term didn't really exist back then). Now, we do. Giving the vast majority of our wealth to a few billionaires like Gates, Buffet, Bezos, etc. costs a lot. So yeah, we simply can't afford this kind of stuff any more.

Well...there was this whole other "boondoggle" going on at the time in SE Asia that was a black hole for the US's money...

I'm not discounting the efforts the US made back then. And there are many ongoing efforts - obviously I am not discounting those. I am questioning the rationale to not take advantage of the significant lead, especially when we (as humans) have better technology than before

> but the thing is, no one could figure out how to actually make it work reasonably cheaply without seeming like a lavish and pointless boondoggle to Congress.

I'd sooner they spent the money on a lavish boondoggle that would inspire a generation (moonbase) than a lavish boondoggle designed to blow stuff up (F35).

Note: I'm not a disliker of the F35, I think when they work the bugs out it'll be a pretty fantastic plane - though whether it'll be value for money is arguable (and there isn't enough evidence one way or the other).

Moonbase will be a lavish boondoggle designed to blow up and then activists will argue that this boondoggle must be scraped and money redirected to world hunger/saving whales etc.

Send the activists to the moon base, you see a problem I see a solution.

The Moon doesn't buy us much... Water ice and He-3, sure, but that's about it. You can't swing a dead cat in the solar system without hitting a chunk of water ice and we are a long ways from needing substantial quantities of He-3.

Mars makes a more sense for a lot of reasons. A self-sustaining outpost on Mars is a _lot_ more plausible than the Moon. Due to the availability of carbon, there are a lot of substances that are a lot easier to make on Mars (notably, rocket fuel). The Martian atmosphere is 100x less dense than Earth's, but it is 100000000x more dense than the Moon's. While ~0.01 atm isn't a lot of pressure, it's certainly enough to be useful.

The Moon is closer, but really they're both firmly in "if something goes wrong, you'd better be able to fix it on your own" territory. It takes a bit more energy to get to Mars, but since you can use the atmosphere of Mars to slow down, the difference in energy requirements to get to the surface of each aren't vastly different.

If ESA and CNSA want to head to the Moon, great, I think any progress in that direction is great, but I think Mars is a much better goal (and the Moon isn't really "on the way" to Mars).

   > you can use the atmosphere of Mars to slow down

Is that true? Because my understanding is that Mars have just enough atmosphere to cause troubles but not enough to help. Hence the tumbler design of smaller spacecraft landing on it and insanely complicated landing of Curiosity which is larger.

The Martian atmosphere is commonly used to aerobrake. If you can use parachutes in the Martian atmosphere (at least to some extent), you can sure as hell use it to slow a spacecraft.

https://mars.nasa.gov/mro/mission/timeline/mtaerobraking/

https://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/mgs/sci/aerobrake/SFMech.html

https://mars.nasa.gov/odyssey/mission/timeline/mtaerobraking...

etc.

Curiosity's complex landing system had little to do with the atmosphere, and a lot more to do with a) not wanting to land the thing on a hillside or in a crater it couldn't get out of (which nearly happened to Opportunity - http://www.space.com/36587-mars-rover-opportunity-landing-si...) and b) the much larger size than previous rovers, making airbag bouncing less suitable.

The Moon works as a nice achievable MVP for a first iteration at colonisation tech.

Mars is orders of magnitude harder and more likely to end in failure - which apart from the immediate fate of the victims, would also be a PR disaster that could set colonisation programs back by decades.

There's a lot to be said for developing launch tech to explore/colonise/mine the rest of the solar system from the bottom of a shallow gravity well instead of a deep one.

In many ways, Mars is easier. Really the only way it's harder is that it's further away (so it takes more energy and travel time for stuff (both payload and communication signals) to get there).

The Moon, on the other hand, lacks an atmosphere, has very little gravity, and is extremely resource poor, and has bigger temperature extremes. It presents a lot of challenges that don't exist on Mars (or are substantially reduced).

If you want to build a base as a staging area for expeditions, there's no point in putting it on the surface of anything. Just stick it in the Earth-Moon L2 (rather than wasting a couple km/s getting down to the surface of the Moon and back).

You need to read this https://www.amazon.com/Penetration-ebook/dp/B00OQT960G/

Written by the guy whose pre-Voyager psychic remote viewing of the gas giant Jupiter revealed its rocky, mountainous, crystalline surface? Yeah, I'll pass.

And still the military hired him for decades https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stargate_Project#Ingo_Swann

The military has a long history of spending huge amounts of money and time on stupid, failed shit.

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