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Add to that, it's a research mission down another gravity well.

There are so many practical advantages in a Moon base that I don't know where to start. It's very surprising to see them ignored in every discussion about relative merits of the Moon respect other options. Maybe they've been forgotten because much time passed since Apollo.

The main point is probably that the Moon is not another gravity well. It's a much much weaker gravity well. Take a look at the Saturn V and then to the LEM. Of course the former had to carry the later and the other modules. But still, only the upper half of the LEM was needed to put two humans in lunar orbit:

https://youtu.be/sj6a0Wrrh1g?t=171

Another important point: you can cover habitational containers with regolith to provide a good protection against micrometeorites.

Eventually factories will be made. Unlike humans, you don't need to take stuff from Earth, saving tons of fuel. The only things that seem to be a problem to make there are fuel, and oxygen because there's no water. Solar energy is even stronger while not at night, obviously.

Oh and "research project" is a way of talking. You can say "exploration" as well, eventually "industry".

Edit: a couple of advantages more, that I don't see mentioned. One that the Moon has gravity and a surface. That means that humans can work more like on Earth and storage is much cheaper to build.

And another one: if a way to make ships or fuel from lunar materials is found, it would help any other mission. Taking cargo from the Moon to Earth orbit is much cheaper than doing that from Earth surface. Even if you plan to go to Mars or the asteroids, a Moon base is a great thing to have.

> Solar energy is even stronger while not at night, obviously.

Something to keep in mind is that lunar nights last something like 13 earth days (a full lunar day is 27 days, 7 hours, and change.) So there's a big power storage issue to contend with. Perhaps nuclear power on the moon is the way to go. It wouldn't be the first time a fission reactor has been put into space.

One solution would be to build a base in a pole with solar arrays in opposite directions so when one of them is blind, the other takes over. The poles are also interesting for other reasons, see detritus' comment.

Anyway, I'm sure there would be some other solution, maybe just halting production for two weeks.

How would the power be transmitted? Laying wires across the moon seems like a huge undertaking. Maybe this would be an ideal application for microwave power transmission between satellites or even statites?

If long-term human occupancy of the moon became a thing, it would be interesting to see what sort of cultural changes occur in a population working on a 'two productive weeks; two rest weeks' schedule.

No atmosphere, I guess a laser would transmit power well.

I'm reading gp's suggestion as a single base in a single pole, which always gets sunlight from one direction. Cabling can be very short.

Yes, but even in a single pole cable would not be too short. After all we're considering bootstrapping, and moving tons of copper to the Moon doesn't sound cheap. I've heard there are points which the sunlight never reach, but not about permanent sunlight.

A quick search indicates that indeed there is no permanent sunlight, which, yes, invalidates the suggestion that just solar panels could be enough.

https://www.sltrib.com/opinion/commentary/2018/02/03/comment...

"Due to the orientation of the moon’s spin axis, the sun skirts and circles around the polar horizon. On certain mountain peaks, or elevated crater rims, the sun shines 80 percent to 95 percent of the year, with short periods of darkness easily bridged by temporary power sources, such as fuel cells."

I thought that we were fairly sure there's water at the poles, frozen in the permenant shadows created in some craters?

checks

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_water suggests we have a lot of evidence to imply there is, but until we get there and extract enough for a cup of tea, I guess we can't be sure.

We're pretty sure, and we are working on getting samples [0]. I'm not sure if we have a plan to send up a tea bag on the rover, but I'm going to suggest that that be added.

[0]: https://www.nasa.gov/feature/new-viper-lunar-rover-to-map-wa...

A lot of the justification for human space exploration seems to be circular and rest entirely on the quasi-religious belief that sending people into space is inherently good. Once you take away that belief, there's not much reason to do things like building factories or habitats on the moon.

> A lot of the justification for human space exploration seems to be circular and rest entirely on the quasi-religious belief that sending people into space is inherently good.

It's just a short summary of the reasoning.

Here - https://launiusr.wordpress.com/2012/02/08/why-explore-space-... - some arguments for space exploration in general.

Human exploration in particular becomes more clear when one realizes that modern robotics can't fit a lot of exploration requirements as well as humans can.

Aside from commercial goals - like resources, tourism, support of space equipment - we have natural, if strategic, curiosity of environment around us. We're just at the point when that "around" starts getting bigger than the planet.

> Here - https://launiusr.wordpress.com/2012/02/08/why-explore-space-.... - some arguments for space exploration in general.

I don't think anyone is against using space, but that's quite a different thing from human space exploration. The only specific example he gives of the direct use for space - using artificial satellites - don't require human space exploration. Neither do the more indirect benefits he mentions - international cooperation and having high level challenges. There are plenty of high challenges (even if we just look at space), many that would also have much more tangible benefits in addition to being a high level challenge.

Talking about our natural curiosity isn't a great reason either - we're already doing much more robotic exploration of space than most cultures historically did of their surroundings. And this exploration doesn't necessitate humans.

A good example of benefits of human presence in space is science obtained on orbital stations.

We don't have much more examples of actually being in space for humans - Apollo flights were short and few, so most other examples are either space stations or solo flights. Yet we have advancements of science even from that.

Particularly Apollo flights still represent the best overall scientific review of the Moon - and in general other non-Earth celestial bodies - so from science point of view advantage of robots is unclear. That advantage comes largely from being more economical to send a robot to space than to send a human, but things change with time, and flying to the same place becomes cheaper with time, so this advantage of robots may decrease. Will it be offset by increased robotic abilities is also unclear.

So Stuhlinger's arguments are not the only ones - and rather old by now, so newer ones are better seen.

As for natural curiosity, yes, we did often survey the other side of the river before going there - even before deciding if it makes sense to go, over millennia. Yet by now all rivers on Earth are crossed. So saying that exploration doesn't necessitate humans doesn't seem to generalize - it's the status quo for today, not the necessary law of nature.

...quasi-religious belief that sending people into space is inherently good. Once you take away that belief...

Why would you want to do that?

Not sure about the religious part, but sending people into space is inherently good, indeed. Exactly the same as traveling the world instead of sending a drone to photograph the pyramids. But not everybody can appreciate the difference.

Personal preferences aside, it's difficult to argue against your position unless you define what you think are the goals of space exploration, human or not. Maybe there's also different goals for different persons.

Society grows great when old men build space ships they’ll never get to ride.

> Why the Moon?

We need to poke it with a stick every now and then, so that it knows we're still here.

At this point no one can do a manned Moon landing. That technology has been lost. US doing a landing is a way to reclaim that technology, and that can be useful to start building up some semi-permanent presence closer to the Moon, boosting research and eventually some kind of industry in cislunar space.

> all you (the US) can do in a international consortium to "Moon" is give away the crown jewels in knowhow and tech

From the POV of people involved at the scientific/engineering level, that may very well be the point. The less jingoism is taken upwell, the better for everyone.

> if you’re determined to get stuck with gravity wells

Of course you are. Gravity wells are where the stuff is.

Millions of asteroids and comets are triggered right now ;)

By definition, they are gravity wells proportional to the quantity of stuff they can offer. Smaller gravity wells are disproportionately easier to escape from, granted, but I'm not so sure the ROI of random asteroids will make up for that.

The commenter you replied to likely understood this, so it seems superfluous to point out.

Even visiting the ISS is a form of "going down a gravity well." If every sentence must be accompanied with an asterisk and a "well, actually" explanation, nothing of value ever gets said.

Consider Halley's Comet, which has a volume of approx 960km^3 and a mass of 2.2×10^14 kg. An astronaut standing on the surface could reach escape velocity with a not-all-that-robust vertical jump. For similarly sized celestial objects, the real trick might be not escaping their gravity well.

Granted, it is technically correct to point out the difference is merely quantitative. However, the effects of that merely quantitative difference are so pronounced that in any practical sense there is a qualitative difference in how we would interact with such an object.

>> Even visiting the ISS is a form of "going down a gravity well."

That's my point, though. If they're negligible as gravity wells, what's the point over just a space station? Working isn't any easier. We can't choose its location and orbit so easily. Resources to extract aren't significant. What else?

> Resources to extract aren't significant.

Ateros is estimated at 1.25 trillion in profits [1] I really don't know what you base your opinions on, but science and economy it is not.

[1] http://www.asterank.com

> or the gas-giants' moons for science/the search for extraterrestrial life. And all of those are things that (for large values of `true`) only the US has the capability to do

Eh? If you mean probes, ESA and China are launching missions in the next year or so (Jupiter and Neptune respectively). If you mean _manned_ missions, no-one can do that, currently.

Fair point, though I still think that other nations (and I really do wish them every success!) have had a huge helping hand by leveraging the US's pioneering work on the engineering side. I guess my point is that the US ought to capitalise on the ever-decreasing edge it still has in knowing how to do this stuff, not in trying to reprise past glories for very little return.

> have had a huge helping hand by leveraging the US's pioneering work on the engineering side.

The same launcher that will launch JUICE (ESA's Jupiter moon probe) will launch NASA's James Webb space telescope, because NASA didn't have access to an appropriate American launcher (everything available at time of planning failed on either payload capacity by mass, payload capacity by volume, or reliability track record, AIUI, so Ariane it was) after decades of under-investment.

And most of NASA's highest profile missions this century launched on an Atlas V, which, while made in the US, uses rocket engines designed in the Soviet Union almost 50 years ago and made in Russia (incidentally, these are by some metrics still amongst the most capable kerosene rockets available; underinvestment in rocket engine design isn't _just_ a US thing).

Domestic commercial stuff may take over at some point, but for the moment, NASA is largely dependent on partially or entirely foreign launchers for its highest profile scientific launches.

> [...] I still think that other nations [...] have had a huge helping hand by leveraging the US's pioneering work on the engineering side

If you argue that way, one could just as well say that the US leveraged other nation's know-how to get into space in the first place... This idea also quickly falls apart if you'd just take a look at the pioneering work the Soviets did. Most of the firsts in space weren't done by the US.

As great as NASA was/is, not every great accomplishment was based on their work. The engineering side in particular was done independently and arguably better in some regards elsewhere (Soyuz for example, which incidentally is the basis for the manned Chinese capsules as well).

Do you really think there's anything only the US can do? I suspect China and the EU can do whatever the US can do in space exploration.

But I agree with you that it's unclear the value of going to the moon again.

> "Why the Moon?"

not in the industry, but since the domestic launch capability has been privatized and is still pretty unproven, i'd think that NASA would want to confirm/test/vet the procurement ecosystem and the new launch capability in incremental stages, much as they did for their own systems when things were in-house.

So yes, the US has been to the moon before, but it hasn't been to the moon with these particular fully outsourced launch platforms yet.

The moon is incredibly strategic for off-world manufacturing. This is where the next generation of massive ships must be built and launched. It is also a good dumping ground for resources taken from asteroids. We need the moon.

> More usefully, I'd ask, "Why the Moon?"

Just a guess, but maybe it's because this president seems obsessed with editing himself into the narrative of numerous political and national news events that were historically significant during the early adulthood-middle age years of boomer-era folks like himself. Thus the effort to bring about personally-styled reduxes of the moon landing, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the Iran crisis, the cold war, SDI, etc. All of these make up the notion of the "again" referred to in his slogan. Compare the focus on "American" story points of this period to how little he seems interested in events of similar significance that came into prominence after around 1990, other than opportunistically channeling the outrage of his base over anything connected to Clinton.