A moon landing in 2024? NASA says it'll happen | Hacker News Reader

A moon landing in 2024? NASA says it'll happen

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146 pointszolpidem_dream226 comments

No chance.

This isn't the 1950s. We don't just throw people atop rockets anymore. These are vehicles, aircraft. There is absolutely no way any of the current crop of space vehicles could be made ready for a trip to the moon anytime before 2024.

Going beyond low orbit, away from the sub-45min return time, is something we haven't done in generations. The craft need to be tested, repeatedly. Each test flight then has to be analyzed before the next test flight. The turnaround for a single test will be many months, even a year. Getting all the bits and pieces together would then take many more years of integration work.

Look at the JWST. Look at the F-35. Look at the 737-max. These are complicated systems with layers of dependencies. Our society today simply does not accept the cowboy approach to safety that was the original moon race. The next moon landing will only happen after a decade-long deliberative, iterative, campaign requiring the support of many subsequent governments.

Also, combine ”NASA says contracts to build a lunar lander could be awarded in late February or March.” with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_Lunar_Module#History.

For the LM, the contract was awarded in September 1962, and first flight (unmanned) was in January, 1968.

So, even Apollo’s aggressive schedule needed more time to first flight than what NASA would have now between awarding the contract and landing humans on the moon.

Did we throw away everything we learned in the apollo program? They won’t be starting from scratch on the design.

A good chunk of Apollo knowledge isn't very useful for various reasons.

1) The tribal knowledge to even implement Apollo era technology is pretty much gone

2) Apollo flight hardware doesn't exist, probably couldn't even be manufactured without extremely expensive tooling and build up to recreate outdated hardware.

3) Lots of Apollo era designs don't exist on paper. The F1 engine doesn't really even have a standard design, since every iteration was changed to be "better" by throwing shit against the wall and seeing what sticked.

Would you mind elaborating on that first point?

The people who did it are dead or dying, the tribal knowledge wasn't written down.

From my Jewish perspective, I think of it as oral tradition vs written tradition (like the pre-Mishnaic distinction between the Written Law and the Oral Law).

They need a space flight talmud

In general, I see good commit messages as a Talmudic codification of a company's oral knowledge - complete with back-and-forth conversations, contradictory points of view and distinct characters. Still better than having to go talk to the people involved, some of whom may no longer be in the organization.

(Specifically with commit messages as Gemara and wikis as the much more organized and impersonal Mishnah.)

Or, hear me out, let's add the space flight knowledge to the existing talmud.

It is still surprise to me the switch to woman based Jewish identity and the importance of oral tradition in your culture. Also shocked when Dead Sea Scroll come out, I only knew then the Jewish bible oldest is only 1000 years old.

There’s a theory that all written artifacts are at most 1000 years old. Christian dates (in Roman) got M (1000) infront of all dates and Jewish an V (5000). So we got 2000 years and 6000 claimed history.

Having written the above it appeared to me this could be an ironic illustration of tribal knowledge vs technical documentation issue. Knowing when something happened and reading about it are two separate things.

Isn’t it odd that the most important political and military mission of a generation relied on “tribal information which wasn’t written down?”

Not really?

Especially in an era where you had to literally write things down versus throwing in a link to a slack message onto a Jira ticket somewhere (Which no one will ever read anyway since text search in Jira sucks)

Also its worth emphasizing that a lot of the actual physics regarding like rocket combustion was not understood so the design process had elements of "make a rocket engine that satisfies some generic constraints and we can figure out the black magic parts such as POGO". Not that useful to write down.

> Isn’t it odd that the most important political and military mission of a generation relied on “tribal information which wasn’t written down?”

No. Figuring out how to accurately describe something in writing is hard, and then there are all the details you have to leave out to make the document readable, some of which may be more important than you realized.

Every project relies on tribal knowledge, and much of that knowledge will be lost unless is followed up by an equally massive project by a horde of technical writers to nail everything down.

Technical documents don't have to be readable, they have to be comprehensible (and preferably quite comprehensive too).

They have to be readable enough for the reader to be able to recreate what's described from those documents, and you can only test for that by... trying to use the documents to recreate the work. Which is rarely attempted, especially in large, expensive projects.

(It's the same thing as the "you only have a backup if you actually restored it at least once" adage.)

I'm sure this is a valid point, but I think it is overemphasized.

Much of that tribal knowledge would have been very esoteric and focused on technologies that are no longer critical. for example, fabricating magnetic core memory. I'm sure some of the required skill is gone, but we don't need to use that memory technology anymore.

having been involved in spacecraft operations, it has nothing to do with how the memory is wired up.

there would've been a huge amount of knowledge about how to operate apollo spacecraft in general. there is no way it is preserved.

and this thread is beneath a comment suggesting that we don't start from scratch, and reuse apollo designs. as you point out, we can make better stuff now. the only value to the apollo designs would be if we had operational experience to go with them.

I think the computer aspects are not the most difficult part of the tech stack when dealing with space flight.

Tell that to Boeing. Thier last flight didn't make it to the space station because of two computer errors. Had that happened over the moon, people likely would have died.

Hm, it seems I should have been more specific. I am aware of the mechanism, I'm hoping someone might have even a bit of insight into what that tribal knowledge is/was.

https://www.history.com/news/moon-landing-technology-inventi...

Stuff like

> Finally, the parachutes were folded and packed by hand. During the Apollo missions in the 1960s and early 1970s, only three people in the country were trained, and then licensed by the Federal Aviation Administration, to fold Apollo parachutes—Norma Cretal, Buzz Corey and Jimmy Calunga —and they handled all 11 Apollo missions. Their skills were considered so essential that NASA forbade them from ever riding in the same car together. The agency couldn’t afford to chance that all three would be injured in a single accident.

I also doubt that the seamstresses techniques to sew those parachutes are something easily written down

I don’t think that’s the right way to phrase it. Complicated things are probably written down somewhere, but it’s just not practical to assimilate the knowledge without having been involved in its creation.

The loss of this kind of thinking isn’t so much a failure of people to write documentation, but a natural consequence of things being hard.

I think this is a common problem experienced when documenting the fabrication needs of scientific equipment. I used to work for a lab that had a physicist who worked a lot with magnetometers. A magnetometer is literally just a coil of wire around a solid core. How complex could that be to document? Well he mentioned that there was one alloy that they used for pretty much all of the high precision fluxgate magnetometers were constructed from one alloy. The person/team/company that had made this alloy had went belly up and while they published the contents for the alloy they did not publish the exact steps for how they made this alloy. Because of this some research teams had stockpiled some of this material and it had apparently gave them a bit of an edge. We were "lucky" that my coworker knew a guy who knew a guy who knew a guy in Canada who also had some of this who could build us a magnetometer for our use case as he had some.

This is the best article I could find about this: https://www.geosci-instrum-method-data-syst.net/8/227/2019/g...

This happens because it's almost impossible to write a paper that includes every single detail needed to reproduce your work and fit within any journal's page count limits. For metallurgy it's like trying to write down your family's double chocolate chip cookie recipe except your chocolate chips are atoms, your oven's temperature varies +-500C, and all of your ingredients can spoil when mixed in the wrong order, cooled at the wrong rate, heated at the wrong rate, aren't mixed with trace elements of other ingredients that came in your ingredients, etc.

I have no experience with this but I've heard this also applies to chemistry glass blowers: https://www.nmr.mgh.harvard.edu/news/20150127/nearly-lost-ar...

Metallurgy is fascinating! This reminds me of the semi-secret one crystal cooling process for airplane turbine segments. The entire thing comes out as one crystal and you need very precise temperature control not just as a whole or in various spots but in various gradients of the oven to get the thing come out properly. It would take anyone forever to replicate this from scratch, even though I can easily explain what the expected end result should look like.

Add the extra methods to the Supplemental Material then. Science is nothing without reproducibility

Unfortunatelt in my experience, science is nothing without tenure and writing easily reproducible research is not what gets you tenure. Writing many papers with many citations is.

> This happens because it's almost impossible to write a paper that includes every single detail needed to reproduce your work and fit within any journal's page count limits

This is a big problem. Storage and distribution is free. Why be limited by the number of pages in a physical journal?

Science really needs some proper upheaval, mainly related to the "publish or perish" doctrine.

It's not just that. The problem is similar to one known in tech companies. There's lots of operations knowledge that exists only in internal e-mail archives (or God forbid, Slack archives), random scripts on someone's work machine, or that's passed around verbally from employee to employee. People don't have enough time or sense to document this and then maintain the documentation (and like with backups, you don't know if a process is truly documented until you try to recreate it just from that documentation).

Then somebody leaves and suddenly work grinds down to a halt for a week, because people try to recreate a small but crucial piece of lost tribal knowledge.

Now imagine that, but across more serious domains like metallurgy or jet engine design, and imagine trying to recover that knowledge after the company no longer exists and most employees are either retired or dead.

In this there's a sense that "unused muscles atrophy" applies to technology. As a human race, we currently do not have the capability to put a man on the moon. We had it once, but it's gone now.

A little tangential but the SLS itself is an attempt to reuse technology off the shuttle... and yet, hundreds of billions later and nothing... the whole concept of technology repurposing is fine on paper... but for some reason NASA can’t even seem to do that right either. It’s a colossal mess...

Sounds like software; trying to build on top of 40+ year old software vs building something new.

> 3) Lots of Apollo era designs don't exist on paper. The F1 engine doesn't really even have a standard design, since every iteration was changed to be "better" by throwing shit against the wall and seeing what sticked.

I believe the F-1 specifically does have full CAD models now after a reverse engineering effort, though in general your point still stands. They attempted to restart J-2 production for Ares, but ran into so many complications that the J-2X was basically a clean-sheet design

In addition to technology loss mentioned in other replies, reproducing Apollo designs without major redesigns is not a viable option for simple cost reasons: no NASA program in the foreseeable future will have anything near Apollo's budget, and so any new moon lander will have to be much cheaper.

Given the advances in control systems, simulation, and materials I think this is very doable, but it's work.

NASA's budget during the Apollo era peacked in 1966 around 4.5 billion. That's about 35 billion in today's dollars. That's a fair bit more than the actual NASA budget of 23.5 billion but it's not all that far off.

The money is there. The challenges are mostly, as other's have noted, large changes in safety requirements and general execution challenges for large scale projects in today's America.

During Apollo a majority of that budget was dedicated to Apollo. Modern NASA maintains the ISS, multiple observatories, satellites, the DSN, and dozens of similar projects, budget alone does not paint a clear picture

Ya that's true. Apollo was 60-70% of NASA's budget for close to a decade. There's a lot more going on now. If anyone is curios about the details, there's a good summary here:

https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/atoms/files/fy2020_...

I have a friend who ordered the mechanical drawings for a P-51, intending to make P-51 assemblies. In investigating this, he talked to some P-51 experts who told him that the drawings were nearly useless.

The real specification of the airplane was the tools and jigs created to make and assemble the parts. Those are long gone. The mechanical drawings were made after the fact to satisfy some DoD requirement.

This. I used to work in automotive engineering. I marveled at the lack of security around drawings for mechanical components. Ford, GM, and Chrysler all used the same design shops to create blueprints. When I went to get the latest drawings they would be sitting out on a big table in the lobby. The rolled up blueprint on top of the 9"mag tape that contained the CAD files. They were clearly marked with the car's model year and the part name and number. Anyone could grab it off the table. Only later in my career did I understand that the drawing for a component, while necessary, was more of a record, not an actual representation of the final component. The final part was a product of a tool that had been crafted to produce it. Die barbers had polished a stamping tool to get a wrinkle out. Someone in manufacturing had changed the melt time for a casting. The slump temperature for a windshield glass had been adjusted. A spray pattern for body paint was manually plugged into a robot arm and adjusted until the desired results were obtained.

chuckle, Classic case of the documentation doesn't match the "code".

Yes. The UK encountered a variant of this with its project to extend the life of the Nimrod recon aircraft, which were built on airframes that had essentially been designed in the 1950s. The aircraft all being individual meant that a conventional waterfall project to build new parts and retrofit them encountered huge cost overruns. Someone described it as more of an "aircraft reenactment society" than a viable aircraft for the 21st century. One caught fire in the air and the project was eventually abandoned.

And we've known this for a very long time - some of the SR-71 jigs were intentionally destroyed after the planes were built which was typical for secret projects. If we wanted to build more we'd essentially have to start over.

Organisation memory perhaps is a better word though not tribal / cultural memory.

You can’t write everything done and for an ongoing concern you always have people around.

In fact one of the problem is these Organization memory is sometimes in the way and you do not know why or even that exist.

But here is about the absence, as it is not an on-going concern.

Organisation would imply to me that the knowledge was held by the organisation as a whole though. Tribal implies small groups of individuals, which is probably closer to the truth.

Some things will have to be rebuilt though. I read a story the other day (probably from HN as well) about rebuilding an older model rocket engine, because they still had the plans. Turns out a lot of that depended on the skill of the engineers, welders, machinists etc at the time, which could compensate for small changes on the fly. It didn't work the same with modern manufacturing technologies and materials. Mind you I do believe the modern stuff is better, they can do the same or better performance with less material and waste.

Not to mention SLS which is just nonsense at this point. As well as the numerous delays on the demo missions to the ISS. This feels to me like an ultimatum to NASA... move the ball forward or get out of the game. I get the sense there is real fear we could lose the idea of ‘space’ if we don’t start showing some progress. As it stands now there isn’t a platform for the moon and there’s not going to be a platform by 2024 unless some really remarkable things start to happen.. I wouldn’t be surprised if Spacex does it but if it does I can’t imagine NASA will have anything other than token participation. Perhaps that is really for the best...

NASA is going to end up being the label on the shipping crate. They don't have a funding model sufficiently detached from political actors trying to sell the sizzle and uninterested in somebody else's steak.

NASA builds, deploys, and operates the largest and most successful space exploration network in history and will hold that distinction for the forseeable future. The lunar campaign seems designed to force commercial partners to step up and become the UPS and Uber service for future NASA instruments and missions. You seem to be focused soley on SLS as a failure case and forget that when it comes to huge campaigns with fast turn arounds and zero room for error they dont have the funding model period.

I’m reading the reddit thread below and I’m inclined to say maybe as a permitting organization, there’s not just a place but a critical need for an org like NASA:

https://www.reddit.com/r/spacex/comments/f2a1yx/eric_berger_...

But at the same time, how can it accomplish its mission without going on boondoggles like SLS? I just saw an article yesterday about a project they funded for Lockheed Martin for them to explore an SST that doesn’t create loud shockwaves... I guess you could say this falls under the Aeronautics mandate but really? Is this an area of research that needs government funding? Or can they say anything that furthers the understanding of safe flight and NASA’s regulatory mission of private space flight, then its justifiable?

They have consistently been successful at what you could call JFK-less varieties of exploration, where nobody gets to be the JFK and make a big speech about Mars human landings and decree a project that will get their name in the history books.

Every JFK-project they have been saddled with, after the original, fizzled. This is because each incoming administration (without regard to party) wants to be the JFK. They don't want to deliver what the previous man hyped. Tear it up, back to the drawing board.

Where it's an unassuming team of scientists plugging away making lander robots or what have you, they can do that.

They seem competent to me at preventing disastrous mishaps and making discoveries past Moon/Mars colonizations

SpaceX might be able to throw something on the moon by 2024. But for a manned mission...

Just look at Crew Dragon. SpaceX started development in 2014, and the first manned flight is planned for april 2020. 6 years, and it not designed from scratch.

SpaceX likes to set unrealistic expectations. And while they get the job done (SLS should take note...), they are not doing magic. This is not the 50s anymore, they have to work within a budget, and with much more consideration given to safety.

I think Blue Origin will explode into the space race. Bezos is a smart fellow and his number one passion is space. I think competition between SpaceX and Blue Origin is happening right now and is fierce. I'm sure Musk knows what Bezos is up to and that's why he's driving the development of StartShip so hard (and StarLink)

This year is going to be interesting.

People have been saying that for years.

Blue Origin is nowhere close to SpaceX. They are a fun R&D project silently farming out refined small aerospace tech improvements to various space agencies.

They haven't even achieved a single orbital launch to date. SpaceX achieved orbit 12 years ago.

I’ve often wondered why BO hasn’t achieved orbit despite it being public knowledge that Bezos spends a billion / year on it. Other than space being hard, why do think that is?

JWST is considered a highly mismanaged project with all the groundbreaking technology crammed into it.

Yawn, space is dangerous. We would all still be living in trees with this attitude.

I don't believe that we can actually design a system that is safe like this, so yes it needs a lot of testing and iterative improvement. In the meantime, we need to use it to launch equipment and a few brave souls that understand the risks.

Actually to add to that, I think putting timescales in front of something like this as a tendency to clarify the goals and therefor simplify the engineering. If we sit around for decades trying to shave a couple ounces off every single part and build in triplicate redundancy so its perfect it will fail.

If you look at apollo, what you see is that they had a review committee that followed up the work and tested/built their understanding from the ground up. Part of that was ripping out systems that were to complex to be easily understood when possible, and considering how everything worked together.

In many ways this appears to be what spaceX is doing, initial design, prove it out with a bunch of launches, fix problems as they appear, etc. So one of most important design goals is designing something that will be launched thousands of times (not necessarily the same rocket, just the scale) rather than something that is designed to be the perfectly safe vehicle for another half dozen launches before we scrap it for another 40 years.

The problem with this approach is that you don’t get anything for the added risk. We could decide to keep trying. That is, build a rocket, put people on it, send it up, and repeat until one reaches the moon without exploding. That might get us to the moon faster, but it doesn’t improve our knowledge base much faster than carefully managed testing with carefully managed risks.

If we get to the moon while taking a big chance, that doesn’t mean we get to cross off the things that could have gone wrong, but didn’t, as solved.

The public has no appetite for dead astronauts. It's simply not workable to be so cavalier with astronaut lives, even if the astronauts themselves are willing.

Why does the public get an opinion on an individual’s life when they know the risks? To me that’s the height of hubris and is something that needs to get corrected if we’re to move forward.

The public is horrified at astronauts' death, politicians listen to public opinion, politicians cut budgets to "dangerous missions".

PR for space is a very tricky affair.

The public is horrified at whatever the news tells them to be horrified about.

Government employees getting killed in Iraq happens often enough that it doesn't get clicks.

Government employees getting killed in Space happens so infrequently that it will get tons of clicks.

Simple journalism economics.

the self-referential irony here is astounding, my fellow member of the public showing your opinion.

Because the public is paying for it.

That's why a private company can, should, and probably will be so cavalier to launch the willing astronauts.

I think you are right, but there is something wrong if we can't handle an astronaut or two for scientific progress yet are more than happy to throw bodies into the middle-east.

So I question whether or not it matters what the public thinks in this area. Maybe they can just do the work without making it a spectacle. Then an astronaut dies, it makes news for a bit, and the distracted populace moves on in a week.

Manned space flight (especially to the moon) is a stunt. Much easier and less risky to sent robots.

Used to be the goal of the stunt was to stand up to the Soviets. Now it would be for... what? Even less. Definitely not worth lives.

This is a common recurring argument I see regarding human flight.

You say it's worthless for humans to leave Earth. I believe, in the long term, it is critical. And I agree it is a bit of a "stunt" in that exploration has been a human endeavor for thousands of years. It inspires new generations of scientists, and ideally provides a sense of shared national/global pride.

> You say it's worthless for humans to leave Earth

Woah, I didn't say that. But I agree with the rest of your comment.

Robots are vastly less effective than humans. Sending robots to mars to build a habitat for example would be several orders of magnitude slower than just sending humans.

...then you should be thankful that you finally have people in charge that don't give a f about "what the public has appetite for"! And you can count on new-media's collaboration to change their tastes! There's clear advantages to US's current political tendencies, at least play those advantages to the max while you still can, and use this to force & catalyze science and technology progress that will benefit the entire human race ...before political tides change again and progress on this becomes harder again.

We all know that in human history "two wrongs CAN make a right" if the cards are well played.

The purpose of testing is to give you data on things you cannot prove through technical analysis. But in a risk tolerant culture you will just identify issues that you should already know about. That installing gyro's upside down is a bad idea, or that rubber o rings fail at low temperature. Having a rocket explode is a very expensive way of getting that data, and lead to program delays.

The inherent danger of space flight is the reason you have to be rigourous. It is the only way it can possibly be made to work at all. Because people will make stupid mistakes, and the rocket will explode.

We're gonna kill some astronauts, and blame it on Iran.

That is because its a purely politically statement.

NASA's budget and mission is largely kabuki theater. Remember when Bush Jr [0] said we were going to have a moon base and land a human on mars during his reelection year?

[0] https://www.cnn.com/2004/TECH/space/01/14/bush.space/index.h...

We launch people on rockets every year to the ISS.

The Russians do it for the US. The US hasn't launched any astronaut in almost a decade.

SpaceX and ULA have been certified recently to launch astronauts too.

But launching to the orbit of the ISS (about 500 km) is very different from launching to lunar orbit (about 400000 km iirc).

My money is on SpaceX to land on the moon before 2025, not any government. Not even China.

"Even"? China has never been a space exploration powerhouse.

They are in the process of becoming one, and they have a bit more focus than the US.

They do develop but they are on the spacefaring level of 1969 USSR at the moment. Still an enormous way to catch up.

Launching people into space is one thing, but to land them on the moon and get them back safely is infinately harder. 2024? Not going to happen, it's impossible.

Unlikely just from the weight of bureaucracy, but I'm not sure about it being impossible. It took 8 years the first time, and that was in the 1960s. Surely with such technological advances, previous learned knowledge and some gumption it could be done.

one case in point is that you're citing cost-plus contract works. the current environment is conductive to different payout strategies.

even the Russian rocket thrusting nozzle tech that NASA dusted off to use was several years of integrated testing before a full booster test.

While true in general, we already have Falcon Heavy, SpaceX Dragon and if it is just 'make the simplest possible moon mission' and you had the budget, you could make it happen.

However that is not how Congress would do it anyway (NASA can not choice).

'"I am more interested in maximizing the odds of success for this bold undertaking and making it as safe as any human journey into the deep space can be, than I am in having NASA meet arbitrary deadlines," Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson — a Democrat from Texas and the chairwoman of the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology — said at a recent hearing.'

Waiting to make a journey until it is "as safe as can be" means that one never makes the journey at all. This has been NASA's curse since the Challenger explosion. Human space exploration is not going to happen with a "safety first" culture.

It all starts when we leave the womb, which is a stupid reckless decision.

Haha. I have a personal saying that is similar.

"Life causes death."

So, the key is clearly to never live in the first place. :-)

It all began when the Universe was created, which has made a lot of people very angry and is widely regarded as a bad move.

I would reckon it ain't gonna happen by 2024, given the mission critical failures Boeing has had with the Starliner.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/07/science/boeing-starliner-...

Or the SLS system:

https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/10/after-a-corrective-a...

The Starliner is for low-Earth orbit and is not part of the Artemis architecture for going to the Moon.

"As safe as can be" doesn't mean "It's guaranteed nothing will go wrong".

Best efforts vs. guaranteed delivery service.

"Safe as can be" is completely subjective, maybe in 1000 years it will be 100% safe due new technological advances and improvements in simulations, so "as safe as can be" is likely to be way after we are no longer alive.

"Safe as can be" is objective, it means that considering what we know, our tech and what may go wrong we can say "we are not going to be able to make it safer before a long time, we have eliminated random threats we can foresee but we can't prevent what we don't know that could happen from ever happening". That's what `as safe as can be` mean. `As safe as can be` doesn't mean 100% safe.

You are conflating the unknown with subjective.

Spacecraft are on the edge of known technology. New components, materials, designs, computer simulations, etc., are being created all the time. What we know is constantly changing so "safer before a long time" does not really apply.

I'm not so sure that the phrase necessarily means exactly what you are saying it does.

Specifically, does it mean "as safe as can be given our actual budgetary constraints" or "as safe as can be given a 1000x increase in funding that would make it marginally safer but certainly not be worth the additional investment" ?

Here we go again...

Why I remember almost 6 years ago, after the Virgin Galactic crash, when we debated the merits of humans in space.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8540279

Anyway, I think I lost and people were confident that Virgin Galactic would soon be back.

I’ll just repost one of my summary thoughts. The entire thread is worth reading. It’ll probably be repeated in some form today.

“ Someone dying is devastating. Trying to conquer space a handful of people at a time is the slow and dangerous way of accomplishing this task. We should be building machines to explore the solar system. This can be done for a fraction of the cost, time, and it will allow him to allow us to iterate quickly. In 100 years, more humans will live off earth if we iterate with machines, etc now than if we move slowly trying to reduce the risk in order to keep humans safe.“

I mean, we have already been exploring the solar system with machines, for a good while. Humans are much more capable today (and for the foreseeable future) at conducting a wide range of tasks in space than the machines we can currently send up.

It could be argued it would be faster to send humans up to build the infrastructure for more humans now (in the near future) than it would be to wait for robotics to get advanced enough to build that infrastructure for us in space environments.

We accelerate the development of our machines and iterate faster with the extra money saved by not sending humans.

At some point in the future, our machines will do most of what we can. The advanced robotics, etc will pay an extra dividend on earth too.

Are you trying to tell me that in the era of Boston Dynamics' Spot Mini and Waymo/Tesla Autopilot we couldn't come up with robots capable of building space infrastructure for us?

Those are really good examples of exactly why we can't. All of those just have really good marketing behind them.

Spotmini at this point is kind of just a neat toy. It doesn't really do anything. It is definitely not autonomous and requires human intervention.

Self driving cars are a bit of a pipe dream unless there is a massive breakthrough in actual A.I. they don't work outside of ideal conditions. Driving in rain, snow, sunrise, sunset are all out of reach for the most part. As they lack human intuition and they can't react on the fly. For example there is no way it would be able to navigate a parking lot that needs to be repainted. But humans do all the time.

What can a human in a spacesuit accomplish on the moon that a machine can't? It's a genuine question, though I'll admit my initial answer is not much.

The human-driven rover on Apollo 17 drove 35.9 KM in the three days Apollo 17 spent on the moon. Lunkhod 2 went 39 KM, but it took from January to June 1973 to do so.

When the distance from Earth increases, machines become slower. Opportunity drove 45 KM, but it took 14 years.

nothing Tesla autopilot can't handle... (less pedestrians on the moon than even a city in arizona!)

Some more craters and layers of light moondust to sink in, though.

Climb down a cliff using rope system.

But what do we get from having humans in space? There is no foreseeable path at the moment to a permanent settlement supporting even hundred people. Sure, we can invest in research in this direction, and in the effects of space on human bodies - we already have the ISS for that. But what could be gained from another human on the moon? What was gained from the first one?

Building a permanent settlement for 2-10 people is a really good exercise if you eventually want a permanent settlement for 100 people.

Someone dying is devastating if you have a connection to that person. People die every second and if everyone was devastated by every death then the world would grind to a halt. The first people going into deep space dying would be devastating to billions because billions of people will feel a personal connection to the person dying. This is a grave thing causing so much pain, but hopefully space travel can become a boring activity like landing a rocket has after 80 successful ones.

If people aren't going to space it not being conquered. Explored, but not lived in. About 270 men left on the Magellan expedition and 18 returned. Some people are willing to take that kind of risk for the right kind of project/adventure. I give my best wishes to those who wish to try.

Yes, that was covered six years ago too. The Alaskan fishery example is a modern comparison.

We retired the Space Shuttle because it was too dangerous. One accident every hundred flights.

We live in a different world than we did hundreds of years ago. One accident will require a review board and many expensive changes. Flights will be grounded.

The point that I really want you to get is this:

“In 100 years, more humans will live off earth if we iterate with machines, etc now”

NASA/US Govt retired the space shuttle since it was extremely expensive to operate and there was funding competition for next generation vehicles/missions.

Safety might have had a impact, but it was not the reason the shuttle was retired.

Yes, the Shuttle was expensive and Project Constellation was going to replace it. We’d only be without orbital capabilities for a few years.

https://www.nasa.gov/pdf/163092main_constellation_program_ov...

Unfortunately, that was canceled 10 years ago. That was superseded by Orion?

More or less. Constellation was effectively broken up into smaller chunks (Artemis, Orion, Commercial Crew) versus being a unified program.

Why have one manned space program when you can have three for 3x cost.

Because they have completely different mission parameters.

Commercial crew is for ISS trips, so short duration trips, so limited life support or things like toilets required.

Artemis needs to send a lander to the moon and come back. So 3-7 days with extended life support, and the ability to land on the moon with a vehicle and take off within the size confines of a single launch.

Orion is for deep space exploration, no lander necessary, and extended life support.

So yes, three completely different vehicles. The last time we tried to combine multiple roles into a unified chassis, the F35 happened.

Could be true, but if we wait too long I think people would just stop trying to do it. Rocket technology basically was stuck with 1960's technology and ideas until Elon Musk decided he wanted to build a human colony on Mars. Now we have rockets that are re-usable and soon a likely $100/kg to orbit lift capability.

After crew dragon, SpaceX is decoupling from NASA and won't be beholden the their review their board. The NASA astronauts can continue to head up to the ISS on crew dragon while others can head off into the solar system in the Starship without them.

I wouldnt worry about those who dont understand why we must immediately become spacefaring. They're obviously on the "wrong side" of history as environmental pressure will make unarguable.

I'm more in the "humans are much less competent than you seem to think" camp. No amount of needing to get off the planet is going to make us able to live on Mars (or a similarly unfriendly planet). It's entirely possible that you will find yourself on the wrong side of history, where any publicly funded endeavor that didn't go directly or indirectly towards saving our current planet will be retroactively seen as futile and a gigantic waste of resources and brain power.

This is obviously false. Any technology that could allow humans to live anywhere but on earth (the moon, Mars, space stations, generation ship, you name it) would be infinitely more applicable on an environmentally devastated earth up to any degree of devastation.

Living on Mars would be much harder than living on the earth after an all-out nuclear war with the worse effects of global warming present, in the aftermath of a small asteroid strike.

In fact, diverting much needed resources from saving what can be saved of the climate for the pie-in-the-sky (literally) goal of having a minuscule handful of human beings possibly live a scant few years off the Earth in 20 years time is lunacy.

We have more resources than we know what to do with. Negative to zero interest rates all over the place. The problems on Earth are not being solved or worked on due to political problems not resource limitations. Plus total current space related expenditures are probably 0.05% of global GDP. Global GDP is ~$85 trillion would mean a space spend of $42.5 billion. Sounds about right.

It's not just about monetary resources. There are also engineering, research, PR and other kinds of resources spent on this.

Not to mention, there are people who seem to honestly believe that moving to Mars is a viable strategy for humanity in the same te scale as global warming (perhaps even Elon Musk among them? Hopefully not, but definitely GP among them). That is such a silly idea, but with such potential to be used in the concentrated campaign of convincing people to ignore global warming, that it must be spoken against any time it comes up.

> "Someone dying is devastating."

But it's not. We're more than happy to throw human lives at most things. Any sufficiently large civilian project (much less anything military) will have a greater-than-zero expected death toll from accidents, on-the-job medical issues, etc. And arguably this is the right way to make the omelette (although we've definitely improved in the past few decades: https://www.forconstructionpros.com/blogs/construction-toolb...).

It's only when we get to space travel that we suddenly become shy about the human cost of progress. It's big and dramatic and failures are very public. Arguably we should be willing to take much greater risks at this point to establish ourselves as interplanetary.

I think the difference is that most other things have a point other than having a human being in the scene. So if we're building an airport, a crane collapses, and workers die, we mourn and move on. (And hopefully find out what went wrong so that we don't repeat the same mistake.) And the final constructed airport has its uses, so in a morbid way, their deaths were not in vain.

On the other hand, there's no other point in human space exploration: almost anything a human being can do, a robotic probe can do far cheaper. So the point is literally to have a human being there, and having the human die there is not just a risk, it negates the entire premise of the project.

No one will plan an Olympic opening ceremony with a non-negligible chance of someone dying on stage. Why? Because the entire purpose of the Olympic is to show off your country, and if someone dies while half of the world is watching, you have failed your project. Same thing.

>almost anything a human being can do, a robotic probe can do far cheaper

... and far more inefficiently. I can't find the article right now, but a while back there was a submission on here which argued that sending robots into space instead of humans is a bit of a fallacy. Because the state of robotics and their capabilities is far from what could be achieved by sending a human. There were comparisons like the Apollo astronatus bringing back half a ton of moon rocks whereas Mars probes can only sample tiny amounts of soil. Also one of the Mars rovers (Opportunity? I can't remember the names) in its years of service only covering a few kilometers, something a human could do within a day.

EDIT: It was Opportunity and its mission lasted 15 years. Impressive nonetheless, but boy is it slow ;)

You are right but it's comparing apples to oranges. If you compared missions of comparable weight you would find that capability of robotic missions increased many times over current missions, reason is that any human mission would be much more massive than current unmanned missions. This is especially true for long range manned missions where crew needs food, water, shielding and space to survive long term in space, for a robotic mission distance is just time.

What robots cannot do well is be flexible in their mission. This is something that humans excel.

Fair point. I guess the best solution would be to just further develop both: Manned and unmanned missions.

Also I think the psychological effects of having actual humans doing this stuff on the people staying back home should not be underestimated. Would we have an Elon Musk today[0] hadn't we landed Neil Armstrong on the moon in 1969?

[0]Or at least SpaceX, this guy's endeavours are all over the place :D

I'm not sure what the net tonnage of robot missions we've sent to mars to date is but that level of knowledge we've acquired is on the same order as what we'd get from a couple humans spending a week there with a bunch of tools and scientific instruments. Humans ability to improvise lets us quickly identify what is of interest and study it saving us from having to send multiple iterations of robots.

For any given fixed distance (e.g. mars) at some point there's a crossover where sending some people up there to go kick rocks is actually cheaper than sending a series of robots that kick rocks in progressively more detail. I'm not sure if we've reached that technology point yet but as space flight gets cheaper and cheaper it will eventually happen for the moon and then for mars.

Well, if we're building an airport, why not just have robots build it? By your same logic, it would be so much cheaper! No healthcare or wages or food or unions to deal with! Plus, no chance of accidental death that would make the public feel sad about that airport!

You see the fallacy in this argument yes? You're only looking at pure operating cost. Saying robots are cheaper ignores so many other factors like the insane amount of capital it would take to develop robots that could be anywhere close to as productive as a human. In addition, everything past Earth orbit is far enough away that Earth cannot make real-time decisions for you. Robots cannot make split second decisions to save themselves. Being able to think is extremely valuable is extreme environments.

Plus, this argument just plain ignores the entire point of space travel. We must permanently populate other planets or we will become extinct. Full Stop.

A bunch of robots colonizing the Galaxy cannot carry with them the light of consciousness.

Of course, the "fallacy" is that humans are actually cheaper than robots for a lot of things, when you don't have to drag a metric fuckton of gas exchangers, thermostats, pressurized suits, landers, antennae, and what not.

I thought that part was well understood.

safety first doesn't mean no risks can be taken, but rather that concerns like publicity or money don't become a primary concern for NASA the way it <sort> of was with the challenger disaster

The Space Shuttle isn't exactly the safest nor the most efficient design to ferry astronauts into space.

I agree with most people that it would be nearly impossible without a Manhattan Project style commitment from the Government and I don't see that happening.

That said, an interesting thought experiment would be to put a Falcon 9 second stage to 'sleep' on an up coming mission for a couple of weeks and then have it wake up and relight. If that works push it to a month.

With a system like that you could Falcon Heavy to launch a return stage into a Lunar transfer orbit and have it go into orbit at the moon. Then launch one into LEO. Finally launch a service module and landing craft rendezvous with the stage in orbit, burn to the moon. Land, take off, rendezvous with the lunar return stage, and fly back. This uses all "known" technology from SpaceX with a new lunar lander but we know that SpaceX has the propulsive landing chops to pull that off.

It avoids the currently "unknown" technology of refueling a cryogenic rocket in space.

It does require a reasonable launch cadence on SpaceX's part which is why the experiment of can you leave a cryogenic stage around and relight it.

They've done extended, multiple relight tests of the second stage as part of their Air Force mission rating tests.

I don't think it is anywhere near designed to stay usable after multiple days of staying cold, that is a completely different mission profile from what the second stage was designed to do, aka earth orbit missions.

I would expect the stored cryogenics would not take well to it.

Exactly, the main issue is the liquid oxygen on board - withou either active cooling or very clever isolation, there will not be any left after a while, as it will evaporate.

The soviets did experiments with a blok d upper stage that was also kerosene/LOX and were able to push it to a couple days, maybe up to a single week.

So really multiple weeks are not doable due to LOX alone withou turning your already mass limitted upper stage to an advanced orbital propelant depot.

Also longer term you will start hitting also other issues, such as battery power (might need to add solar panels), stuff getting too cold/hot, long term exposure of electronics to cosmic radiation, lack of ulage fuel, etc.

This was the ULA paper I read about 5 years ago : https://www.ulalaunch.com/docs/default-source/extended-durat... There are a number of papers on the ULA site describing fairly innovative ways to keep the LOX from boiling away. As this stage would not have a "payload" in the traditional sense it could have a refrigerator attached :-)

a Manhattan Project style commitment

The Manhattan Project spent about 2 billion over a 5 year period. That's around 23 billion in today's dollars. The 5 year budget for NASA exceeds 100 billion dollars.

Interestingly enough, Ars Technica is reporting today that NASA pegged the cost of meeting this timeline at $35B (https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/02/nasa-puts-a-price-on...) so your estimate of the cost of a Manhattan Project and my suggestion that it was that order of magnitude seem to both be correct!

NASA wants to go to moon in about 4 years (!) but today they can't even lift a human into earth orbit since they discontinued their last spacecraft capable of such a task. Dream on.

They can always hire a commercial rocket SpaceX used to be their long-time partner.

It needs more than just the rocket. You also need a lunar lander, and all we have right now are paper sketches of designs that would take more than four years to finish and build, on conventional timelines. (One wild card is the SpaceX Starship, which Elon is talking about having some lunar capability for, on extremely aggressive timelines. But Starship is a risky project in all sorts of ways -- besides which, before trying to take Elon's timelines to the bank, you might want to look at the years of delays before they finally launched Falcon Heavy.)

Most of the Falcon Heavy delays was because F9 became capable of lifting many of the payloads originally planned for Heavy, which then became (and still is) a solution in search of a problem.

very true, by the time falcon heavy launched it was more of a novelty than anything else. I'm surprised it wasn't scrapped entirely and the effort redirected to BFR.

> needs more than just the rocket. You also need a lunar lander

With blackjack. And hookers.

In fact forget the lunar lander.

> One wild card is the SpaceX Starship, which Elon is talking about having some lunar capability for,

“Some lunar capability” is an understatement. If high elliptical orbital refuelling of Starship works it will completely change the game - eliminating the need for a lander & service module.

Instead of delivering a 25-30 ton lander, they’ll land the entire second stage, with 100 tons of cargo (or dozens of passengers), all at a fraction of the cost of the estimate $1 billion SLS launch cost.

Starship is already being prototyped, and will probably fly this year or next, while NASAs crewed lunar lander proposals are all just proposals.

Lucky there isn't any wind on the moon to blow it over.

LEO requires totally different technology than getting to and landing on the Moon. So yes, they cannot get to LEO, but they've been developing the machines (SLS) that should allow them to get to the Moon. It's doubtful it'll happen by 2024 though.

forget the SLS, it's a jobs program. it might do a mission or two but that's it.

That will change this spring which isn’t too far away.

> Elon Musk’s SpaceX simulated a successful emergency landing on Sunday in a dramatic test of a crucial abort system on an unmanned astronaut capsule, a big step its mission to fly NASA astronauts for the first time as soon as this spring.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-space-exploration-spacex/...

Uh huh, that article is from 2017 and also says this:

> Nearly 45 years after NASA astronauts last embarked on a lunar mission, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has announced his company's plans to send two private citizens on a flight around the moon in 2018.

The flight sending American astronauts into space aboard Falcon 9 + Dragon is scheduled for May. So not long to wait.

The decided it wasn't worth the effort to do all the additional work to man rate falcon heavy when it would probably be hardly used as they have shifted focus to their bigger starship rocket.

I am extremely pessimistic that the 2024 launch will happen.

The linked article gets to most of the main reasons, but man, could you imagine the fallout of a Apollo 1 type incident leading to a loss of the Artemis crew?

NASA, as a govt agency, slingshots between "safety above all else" and "launch the bastard"

There's not much reason to settle the moon and mars prior to the remote establishment of an independent food supply. Aggressive remote terraforming through domes, mirrors, foreign microorganisms, explosives, and robots should come first. Establishing automated synthetic systems on these rocks to mimic what nature provides for free on Earth is the hard problem to be solving. Without such systems already place, wages will be extremely low and no one will want to live there.

Viability due to public opinion is a reason. I think that NASA has been successful enough in popularizing the ideals of not interfering with the potential biospheres (or lacks of biosphere) of other planets, 'Planetary Protection', that any plan for 'aggressive remote terraforming' would be met with public outcry, for the sake of preserving areological history.

"the ideals of not interfering with the potential biospheres (or lacks of biosphere) of other planets"

I think their ideal is to protect planets from interfering with their ecosystems unintentionally. Microbial contamination, for example. Especially Mars, since we don't know what kind of life, if any, existed or currently exists there. Also some of Saturn's and maybe Jupiter's moons. But I think if there were ever a strategic reason and viable option to terraform one of those bodies, which I think is pretty unlikely anyway, NASA would probably consider it. But by that time, I think it's extremely likely that NASA and the USA probably wouldn't exist as we know it anyway.

NASA states that the first goal of Planetary Protection is to "Carefully control forward contamination of other worlds by terrestrial organisms and organic materials carried by spacecraft in order to guarantee the integrity of the search and study of extraterrestrial life, if it exists." [0]

It does seem that unintentional interference is the main concern, but intentional interference almost certainly won't be considered on the relevant timescale, which is now until the first Mars landing, since aggressive terraforming was posed as an alternative to unsustainable Martian colonies.

[0] https://sma.nasa.gov/sma-disciplines/planetary-protection

It may be easier to undertake a massive industrial operation on an unfamiliar celestial body when there is a human around to oversee things first-hand and troubleshoot issues when (not if) they arise.

First Lunar habitats are going to be mostly underground anyway, and nuclear-powered. Not much is needed to terraform.

I'm constantly "impressed" (not in a good way) at how good some people are at saying completely unfounded statements as fact. There is literally no reason to believe either premise of most bases being underground, nor is there to believe nuclear power will be the dominant power source. We have a hard time getting RTGs inside steel boxes capable of surviving disasters into orbit.

You don't need the reactor working, or assembled, on the way to the destination. Consider a pebble-bed design.

Digging underground is a reasonable way to get a massive layer of radiation protection without carrying it with you. This is important when you are just starting a long-term habitat. Later designs can of course be different.

1) The issue isn't limited to the existence of the reactor. It is linked to the public perception of anything nuclear being launched into the air. A commercial/proven pebble-bed reactor doesn't even exist yet, and last I heard they only started the first design in 2018.

Digging underground is reasonable if your only requirement is "block radiation". Its less reasonable when requirements also include 'get the digging machines into space', 'have it survive landing', and 'learn all the new fun techniques required to dig into lunar regolith in a low g environment with never before tested or used techniques and equipment'

There are already big suitable underground spaces in the form of lunar lava tubes. Those should help massively with bootstrapping of any undrground lunar colony.

Actually, its not hard to make RTG that survives reentry, multi RTGs did just that, one of them even being relaubchen after they recovered it.

Also since some rather missinformed protests back in IIRC cassini times I don't thin anyone really cares about modern RTGs being launched these days.

Please, leave Mars’s surface alone! We’re merely starting to explore it and we don’t understand it. Don’t ruin it before we have a chance to.

Would be better to spend that on robotic exploration. More probes to other planets, the Sun, asteroids etc. and space telescopes. Much greater scientific return on the dollar.

Manned programs provide more money to important voter blocs.

if you put a scientist with a shovel and a lab kit on the surface of mars, he'd do more science in a week than all the robots we've sent there to date.

But what would the cost to put a scientist on Mars for a week vs all the robotic missions we've sent so far? Which of those missions does the human mission require as a sunk cost?

NASA's best bet is to bite the bullet, scrap the SLS already, and help pay for SpaceX's development.

SpaceX has a publicly announced rocket design that is capable of getting men to the Moon and back. They are working on it for themselves. They are looking for every source of funding that they can get. They already are planning suborbital flights this summer, and already are looking for it to be human rated by NASA.

Their announced timeline (which is probably ambitious but that is par for the course) includes suborbital flights this summer, aiming for orbit by 2020, going around the moon in 2022, going around the Moon with a human inside by 2023, and humans on the moon for 2024. They have a record of being ambitious, but also a record of launches. And nobody on the planet in recent years has developed more successful rockets or had more successful rockets than SpaceX. More impressively, nobody has done it so cheaply.

So...why isn't Trump talking to Elon Musk yet?

There's a reason SLS is nicknamed the Senate Launch System -- Sen. Shelby of Alabama rains fire down on any NASA official who comes anywhere near observing that SpaceX could fulfill any objectives allocated to the SLS. It's as much a pork barrel, to use the political lingo, as it is a rocket -- a steady source of jobs for Alabama and a couple other Southern states for as long as it's in development / production. And no one cares enough to take on Shelby and his allies.

So, rational proposals like using SpaceX are sadly political non-starters at the moment.

It really does seems rather un-democratical if just single (albeit voted) representative wields so much power, apparently withou much the others can do about it.

> So...why isn't Trump talking to Elon Musk yet?

Maybe he has, maybe he hasn't.

But as a person who has done big deals before, he almost certainly understands that congress needs its cut.

Congress needs to shovel enough pork to defense contractors so they get campaign contributions to get re-elected. They just won't support a budget that cuts that out.

IMO, the only real hope is that congress + the next president can carve out enough money (ideally at least 10% of the SLS budget) to actually do something useful.

> So...why isn't Trump talking to Elon Musk yet?

Because what NASA does is not a decision where Trump has much say.

Trump nominally appoints NASA top leadership and sets the agenda, but the budget is entirely decided by the Congress. It doesn't matter what Trump would want NASA to do if the only things that get funded are the SLS contracts.

Remeber this? https://techcrunch.com/2017/06/01/elon-musk-leaving-trump-ad...

Why isn't Trump talking to Elon Musk? Because he has NASA.

NASA has a proven record of human and machine space exploration. It put men in space 60 years ago. It put men on the moon and returned them all safely before Musk was born. Despite its second mover advantage, SpaceX has never put a human in space and the only celestial body it has managed to land on is earth.

Granted, SpaceX is good at cheaply delivering Tang to the ISS and shooting sports cars into space. But NASA is currently actually exploring the solar system. It's got robots on Mars, probes going to the belt, the sun and every planet in the solar system and many of their moons. Its got Hubble pointing at the universe and dozens of billion dollar satellites pointing at earth. Send a manned space ship into earth orbit, land it back in Florida and then reused it? Been there, done that. 30 years ago. Good God, it has even got a probe that has left the solar system and is currently flying through interstellar space.

If you want your stock hyped to impossible valuations call Musk. But if you want to explore space call NASA.

https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/missions/?order=launch_date+des...

NASA is doing the same things as SpaceX at a tremendously inflated cost. NASA has also managed to kill something like 20 astronauts - it's hard to say that's a "proven" record.

The anti-Musk bias and astroturfing is getting really boring.

The only way to stop SpaceX is to convince the public they are affiliated with a political party, or that space exploration is a political issue. It’s one of the few arenas that hasn’t been enveloped by hyperpartisanship, so I suspect any actual help Trump may be giving SpaceX either doesn’t exist or is widely being kept out of the public spotlight.

This could be done, if everyone involved were willing to accept massive risk to the lives of the astronauts (including the astronauts, obviously).

By which I mean, after hurriedly building rockets and testing them, finally going ahead with a backup rocket and crew to meet the deadline if the first one blows up on the pad.

With the risk of the backup doing the same...

If they're simply gambling on technology and engineering these days 'being faster', they're doomed to failure and I hope the individuals involved don't wind up killing anyone.

they should hold a press conference and get a reporter to ask about the possibility of SpaceX getting to the moon. Then they respond laughing saying "those amateurs? look, this is NASA, the big boys not some techies with a website". Then just get some coffee and wait.

we'd be back on the moon by 2023.

SpaceX will beat them there regardless. Not out of a difference in skills, but NASA, let’s face it, is a political football. If Trump wants us to go to the moon, half the country will argue we should never set foot there again. NASA is basically gridlocked until the next administration, so SpaceX will get to the moon and Mars first.

The problem with creating custom spacecraft each time is it's expensive and takes a while. It's done to get the most out of a single rocket launch (and because it extracts the most money from the customer AKA Congress AKA taxpayers).

CubeSats have been revolutionary for standardizing small spacecraft launch. Next I want to see CubeLanders: standardized vehicles that land your payload on the Moon.

Also I wish we did more on-orbit spacecraft assembly. A lot of the mass limitations go away if you don't have to fit everything for a moon landing and return onto one superheavy rocket. Just scrap the SLS and pay for a bunch of smaller launches!

No its not. This is a notion that vice president has and NASA would like it. But they will absolutly not get the money from congress. And even more so, Congress only cares about blowing money up Boings ass and literally nothing else.

So any architecture that would actually work and be reasonable quick to deploy, will not be allowed. Congress with force NASA to use lots old technology and force them to use Boing, LM, Northrop. This has just reasently been something were congress published its 'plan' (ie, plan to force 10 billion to Boing and Lockeed).

"The Apollo Program cost roughly $25.4 billion, unadjusted.

That makes the total Apollo Program cost $163 billion inflation adjusted to 2008. That's our total cost to go to the moon. Consider, however, that this was for a project spanning from 1959 to beyond 1970 with six successful missions."

This is not going to happen again unless China decides they want to get there first but, hey, it never hurts to hope.

2004: https://www.nasa.gov/missions/solarsystem/bush_vision.html

"Our third goal," Bush said, "is to return to the moon by 2020, as the launching point for missions beyond."

It's ambitious but possible. And this time it will be permanent, so even more preparation.

We/our government is completely unwilling to invest the multi-trillion dollar expense of creating a permanent moon colony. In light of that, I believe arguments to the effect of "a moon base would make Mars easier" are baseless since creating that type of installation on the moon would dwarf the cost of a single shot to Mars and back. In light of that, our current moon efforts are nothing but make-work doing things we've already done because Mars is actually hard.

Why would a permanent Moon base make Mars easier? Would the idea to build a space elevator or manufacture rockets and fuel there?

AFAIK the main benefit would be lower gravity for launching rockets and easier access (again because of gravity) to mining resources in space. Broadly related: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_situ_resource_utilization

In the (probably very) long term, a permanent Moon base capable of manufacturing and of growing food could be the key to human bases throughout the solar system.

Suppose you need to get from planet or moon X to planet or moon Y, using a rocket.

The usual way is to start at X and use the rocket to put yourself in an elliptical orbit that intersects both the orbits of X and Y. Then you coast in that orbit until it intersects Y's orbit, and use the rocket to put yourself in Y's orbit.

The nice thing about this approach is that it is speedy. If you only can carry enough fuel for limited use of the rocket, I think that this is the fastest way to go.

For a manned round trip mission, you have to take the speedy way, at least for much of the interesting parts of the solar system. Round trip to Jupiter, for example, would be several years at least.

If you do not care about speed there is a much cheaper way to get from X to Y. Interesting thing happen around various Lagrange points giving unstable orbits around them that can extend for vast distances away from the Lagrange point, and which take almost no energy to transfer to from an orbit that is close to the Lagrange point.

So you start in orbit around X, then move to an appropriately chosen X/Sun Lagrange point. This is not very expensive. At that Lagrange point, you nudge into one of those big unstable orbits. Eventually that orbit intersects and unstable orbit for a Y/Sun Lagrange point. A little nudge switches you to that, which eventually takes you to near a Y/Sun Lagrange point. There you can nudge again to get into a stable orbit, and from there it is cheap to get to Y.

But this is not fast. We're not talking nice straightforward elliptical orbits. The unstable orbit phase looks more like the path of one of those desktop tops where you have several magnets on a plate with another magnet on a rigid pendulum switching above it, and it looks like its motion is random. It can take a long time for it to get to one of the points where you can do the transfer to the other unstable orbit, and then that can meander a very long time before getting to the Y Lagrange point.

Depending on the particular X and Y, this can be anything from a few years to a few centuries.

This would be useless for transporting humans, but for long term transport of goods to support humans, it has a lot of potential.

Suppose you want to do a big base on Titan, say, and suppose it's 50 years to send things from around Earth to Titan via cheap unstable orbits. (I don't know how long it actually is...this is just for illustration).

What you can do is start sending regular supply packages to Titan this way. Send, say, one a month. It takes 50 years for the first one to actually arrive at Titan, and then after that you have one arriving per month.

When the supplies start arriving at Titan, then you send the manned mission via the normal fast orbits. Note that since you've got supplies at Titan already the manned mission only has to carry enough food and oxygen and water to last for the outbound trip itself. It does not need to carry anything for the stay on Titan, or for any return trip.

Ideally, what you want to do is as soon as you are technologically capable start using the slow but cheap unstable orbit system to start sending regular supplies to all of the places you think you might want to establish manned bases later. Over the next decades and centuries, as supplies start arriving at those places you can then send the manned missions to explore them, followed by the base building missions if you decide you do want bases there.

You could send them all from Earth, but doing this right would involve sending a whole lot of them over a very long time, and doing so from Earth would take a lot more energy than doing so from the Moon so it probably becomes a lot more feasible if you can make and launch the supply packages from the Moon.

Probably won't ever happen, though, because it requires long term planning on a scale that we no longer seem capable of.

Because most of the technology needed on Mars can be proven on the Moon, which is far, far cheaper to reach and resupply.

Establishing a moon base and concentrating on making it self-sustaining is critical to any successful space penetration by humanity.

Actually, establishing any self sustaining space colony would do. No need to build it at the bottom of a gravity well.

Look at the difference in the size of rocket needed to lift two men to lunar orbit vs earth orbit. It's really not a big deal to blast off from the moon.

Gravity has lots of advantages. For one thing, toilets work.

Gravity is easy to simulate with spin.

That's not so easy - the station has to be very large to do that, otherwise people get dizzy with coriolis effects. With a large station comes the problem of dropping something sharp/heavy and having it crash through the hull.

A large station means every gram of material has to be boosted up out of some gravity well to it.

Whereas on the moon, the idea is to use the material already there.

I get all that. But keep in mind that nothing has ever been manufactured on the Moon. Nothing. I love the idea of using Lunar regolith to make stuff. But the first Moon bases will be shipped there. Just like the first space bases. Baby steps.

Which is rational. The annual product of lunar soil is zero. Extending the margin of production to the moon will lower wages and increase poverty. The only way to get the general public behind the idea of settling other planets is through remote terraforming. If there were robots, domes, mirrors, and synthetic organisms put there first to provide free soil, air, and water to settlers, then the annual product of lunar soil be above zero, and off-planet workers could actually receive wages.

The value of having massive amounts of aluminum made from the lunar crust and sun power can be quite above zero.

Same with water mined from some lunar craters.

With more technology advancement, the oxygen trapped in oxides of lunar soil could also be extracted and put into useful orbits away from Earth surface, hopefully cheaper than brought from Earth.

Well, maybe also some dome-grown fruit and vegetables, but not very soon.

We were able to land on moon in 1969. How come are we not able to do it again 50 years later with all the technological progress?

It’s really about the willpower and desire to have it happen (by which I really mean budget...) .We have the technology to go but it doesn’t make any sense to devote the resources it takes to make it happen. Yes it would take years to put together a manned moon mission again, but I feel confident that if for some reason the US absolutely needed to it could put men on the moon by 2024.

Certainly our knowledge of how to launch Saturn Vs has atrophied. But we do still routinely launch things into space. We put lots of robots on Mars.

I feel like I see this headline every few years with a slight bump to the target year.

I hope not. I like telling old people that nobody has been to the moon in my lifetime. Last moon landing was December 1972, which puts bounds on my age and what I consider old people...

Old person here. I was 13 in December 1972 when NASA talked abut a permanent colony on the Moon by 1984. That drove me to graduate college with a BS in aerospace engineering. I attended one of the top three universities for aerospace. In order to study rockets I had to do it via "independent study" because all of the classes had been removed from the curriculum by 1979.

> A moon landing in 2024 would mean a triumph during the last year of President Trump's second term, if he gets reelected in November.

Yeah, sounds just like Trump to rush this program (and endanger lives while doing it) just so he can bask in its (hopeful) success...

Ignoring that such bullishness is expected of the current administration's appointees, the devil's advocate can make a convincing case;

    Q. Can NASA send a crew to the Lunar Surface by 2024? And safely return them to Earth?

Yes, they can.

Sandworm laid out the mission cost in lives problem, but modern spaceflight already has defined an acceptable margin for loss of crew in most missions - 1 in 270 as set by NASA for its Commercial Crew Transportation System (CCTS) program. The historical mortality rate for astronauts remains at 3.2%, or a Loss of Crew (LOC) rate of 4 in 125 across all vehicles and missions. Let us assume that the political calculus changes and the 3.2% LOC rate becomes acceptable. What's next?

What's next would be the design of a navigation system for translunar and cislunar navigation - after Apollo, and the exploration of the solar system, this has become a solved problem. We can run and code an AGC with inputs from far better sensors on an Arduino. NASA's engineers can also automate astrogation using Commercial Off-The-Shelf (COTS) technology. There are also highly efficient hydrogen upper stage engines available off the shelf for the Orion and the lander.

Unlike Apollo, 2020's NASA can use a more modern approach of Earth-Orbit Rendezvous (EOR) to construct the Trans-Lunar Injection (TLI) stage with a lander and lunar orbiter via separate launches. Low-Earth Orbit (LEO) rendezvous and docking has become routine for us in this era. It's a maneuver that's performed several times each year at the International Space Station. LIDAR and automated docking has made an EOR safe and, virtually, error-free.

For this theoretical exercize, the vehicle could be automatically assembled in an 100mi orbit. Crew could go up and rendezvous in the final lunar orbiter-and-return component of the vehicle, or in a temporary (Dragon) capsule. The EOR approach reduces the size of the launch vehicles required, making it feasible for a COTS provider like SpaceX to provide a Falcon Heavy for this purpose. It also allows for the re-use of current CCTS providers, by letting crew proceed to the vehicle in a human-space-flight rated Dragon capsule (or a mated CSM-equivalent). This system can be constructed via hardware that is currently being flight-rated, or will be flight rated soon, making the SLS redundant (in the short-term).

The SLS - for political reasons - could be repositioned as a long-term support and heavy payload delivery vehicle as a part of an extended Space Transport System, as originally envisioned for the Shuttle. SpaceX could provide the reusable "shuttle" aspect. The SLS heavy-lifter capabilities. And a lunar gateway as a refueling station. A deal that keeps all parties happy.

For the LEM component, NASA has the benefit of hindsight. The LEM designs still exist, there are LEMs in storage and can be mapped in 3D to study them. The data collected from 6 landings can be used to implement "in hindsight" improvements, making it easier to take the LEM template from Apollo and modernize it by reducing the electronics requirement and payload capacity. NASA doesn't have to redesign everything from scratch, there is a design that works. A design that was taken down to the surface with great uncertainty in 11 and 12, but worked for 14, 15, 16 and 17.

The most difficult aspect of the mission - the ascent stage - was studied following Apollo, and can now be trivially simulated in computer games, such as Kerbal Space Program. We can beg, borrow and steal the LEM design, and simulate what the original planners could not, giving NASA a much faster turn-around time this time around. It is conceivable that, if the payload characteristics were more realistic, and the goals of staying on the surface were trimmed down, a slightly up-scaled LEM and a down-scaled Altair/LSAM https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altair_(spacecraft) could be made in 2 years or less. Flown in 3. Making it possible for an autonomous lunar landing in 4 and a surface jaunt in 4.5 years. However, that's theory, which would require tremendous resources to achieve.

After a cislunar docking maneuver, our astronauts can come home riding a far superior thermal protection systems than any contemporary material available in the Apollo-era. The amount of research that has gone into this area is extremely impressive, and gives our pioneers a safe journey home, where they'll land and descend via parachutes - which are far more complicated, but something that NASA, the organization, has more cultural experience with than SpaceX or Boeing.

From this template, a mission is not only conceivable - it's doable. The only question is how much.

How much is congress willing to give to make this a reality? And how far is the Trump administration willing to go to seal the deal?

carrots and rabbit holes

Elon Musk will land on the moon before NASA does. You can carve that prediction in stone.

Maybe but it likely won't be any time soon. https://www.space.com/35876-how-spacex-moon-flight-will-work...

First time for everything.

uh-oh, time to take the secret sound stage in Arizona out of mothballs ....

Okay, boss, this LTX-71 concealable mike is part of the same system that NASA used when they faked the Apollo Moon landings. They had the astronauts broadcast around the world from a sound stage at Norton Air Force Base in San Bernadino, California. So it worked for them, shouldn't give us too many problems.

I'm never sure when watching that movie if Dan Aykroyd is acting or just being himself.

First let's get the space suits and things that actually matter ready this time eh? :p

I would like to know the "why" behind landing on moon project. Don't we already know enough about moon? Why waste money on it? Can't this money be used in other space projects like Mars Landing or earth projects like fighting poverty?

Can somebody explain what the benefit of sending men to the moon is?

I mean science or engineering. I don't mean PR or funding visibility - you can get that by sponsoring a NASCAR ride.

Both the Space Shuttle and ISS have been huge money sinks with no benefit. How will another moon visit be any different?

Because we now know there is water at the Moon’s poles, from which rocket fuel and life support consumables can be manufactured. Because of this, the Moon can be our first permanent foothold in space and the stepping stone to the rest of the solar system.

Why humans? Not just because we aspire spread humanity beyond Earth. Humans also accomplish science objectives much faster than robots. A single human mission can accomplish more science and exploration than a decade-long robotic campaign.

> Both the Space Shuttle and ISS have been huge money sinks with no benefit.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_spinoff_technologies

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_research_on_the_Int...

Astronaut Garrett Reisman on Joe Rogan show said something that resonated with me, we have plenty of experience with 1G of gravity and enough experience with 0G. They know the physical effects of both of those. What they do not know is effect of 0.2G or 0.5G in long term. Whether effect is linear or is it a curve. Etc.

That's just for exploring long term space habitation.

Another major reason to do it would be a potential mining/fueling base on the moon. Cost of any launch from Earth is quite prohibitive due to Earth gravity, Moon has gravity that is 6 times less powerful so if we managed to mine ice/hydrogen/oxygen from the surface of the moon it could be used to refuel rockets in space for missions to the rest of the solar system.

Absolutely no chance. NASA spent 20 years designing this new super rocket, never even built a single one of them; so it only exists on paper, and when you look closely at the design it is basically the Saturn 5 with some slight modifications.

The reason so many engineers jumped ship from NASA and went to work for SpaceX is that at least Elon is doing something with some alacrity. NASA is just a bunch of paper shuffling time wasters at this point (especially at the top). People forget that they subcontracted most of the Apollo project. Having civil servants who never get fired is not the way to achieve excellence in any product or service!

The SLS core stage is assembled and currently undergoing testing

NASA went from nothing to the moon in 10 years.

SLS is repurposed Space Shuttle hardware, not related to Saturn.

you've just described precisely why it is in fact possible to do what they say: there's a company on the market that has both knowledge and appetite to do that. in fact, they might do an unmanned moon landing just to make a point to NASA to simplify their negotiations for a manned one.

Put me in the No Way! column. NASA budget for exploration including SLS is about $3.5 billion. The Apollo mission cost $145 billion. Just not going to happen. Best guess: double budget to $7 billion and spend that much every year for 20 years and we will be back on the Moon.

You mean the entire Apollo program cost $145 billion. This is one mission to the moon with much better technology and lower costs. You just can not compare costs like this.

According to the per-year costing in [0], about 80% of the entire Apollo program cost was accrued before the first moon landing. That suggests that even just one mission will come with a substantial price ticket, even if no hardware is built for subsequent missions.

[0] https://www.thespacereview.com/article/3737/1

Yes, but analogous 80% of the entire Artemis cost are also already spent and the results are there. Engines, launchers, spacecrafts (Apollo analog maiden LEO flight is expected this spring), electronics, power, communications...

Since the lander and gateway are yet to be built let alone tested (at least Wikipedia still has them as a "concept") it seems too soon to say what the final cost will be. By way of comparison the first full Apollo stack flight was 20 months before Apollo 11, which puts it close to the 60%-spend point, and that was some five years after the LM contract was placed.

Here's a prediction of "back to the moon" by 2018 in 2005:

https://www.space.com/1567-nasa-moon-plans-apollo-steroids.h...

Face it lads; we, as in the US, ain't going back. Country will fall apart first. Humans might go back some day. The US won't.

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