Could we get terrestrial railroads into a usable state in the US first though? Should be trivial in comparison.
Also, not sure if we - the people - really want to hear the solution to this problem from a super-weapon company.
The main barrier to building modern rail (i.e. high speed rail) is property owners. Nobody wants to be forced to sell off part of their property to the state to add noise pollution to their property. So everyone fights it tooth and nail.
That's of course a problem and it happens with roads as well but it's standard practice to just eminent domain property for roads if people won't sell. The state will not do this for railroads though. So a railroad project may end up blocked for 20 years because they don't own a 1 mile stretch of land 20 feet wide but with a new highway extension they'll just eminent domain your half your property and bulldose your home after 5 years of negotiating to add a few lanes to an existing road.
This is not to say that eminent domain is a good thing but rather that it's a lot more naunced than "regulators won't rubberstamp the project"
Remember this widely held viewpoint:
> My mother is not expendable. Your mother is not expendable. We're not going to accept a premise that human life is disposable. And we're not going to put a dollar figure on human life
Another short lemma is that having someone leave somewhere they've lived over 10 y is equivalent to violence and we arrive at the proof that grandmas and mothers in the vicinity of anything should stop that thing.
The moon's big advantage is that it lacks women of any sort. Certainly there are no mothers or grandmothers there, so building engineering projects there is possible.
Environmental reviews and construction permits.
I'd prefer that real efforts for such balancing happens even when it adds additional friction and expense because the alternative is significantly worse.
It’s a preliminary request for a quote for a study. This is either meaningless hyperbole or thoroughly uninformed.
Terrestrial railroad infrastructure would cost trillions to replace. Stealing $10M from NASA is not going to move the needle.
Any ten-year concept would be for moving bulk from an extraction site to a landing zone. The train would be minimal and open air. If you want to move people, you drive the rover on the train. (Or just rover.)
I would be surprised if any technology is transferable from existing platforms, which are optimised for hosts of characteristics irrelevant on the Moon.
This is a low value snark comment that should not belong here.
Artemis begins major launches, including for the Lunar Gateway and first crew, next year. VIPER is slated to land in November. We’re already putting billions of dollars of kit on and around the Moon.
If trains make sense for moving bulk on Earth, they do as well on the Moon. If they don’t there—if autonomous rovers are easier than trains even on the Moon—the latter definitely aren’t worth further consideration here.
> Could we get terrestrial railroads into a usable state in the US first
Granted [1]. Circa 1850 [2].
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_rail_tr...
[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rail_transportation_in_the_U...
I don’t necessarily think they correlate that well. I don’t know a lot about lunar transportation but I can’t imagine it has the same design constraints as earthly ones.
> When did HN become so trivially Luddite?
Space shit is cool. I would still like the government to fund something more likely to be used by the American population first. Yea that industrial rail network is cool but why can’t we get around the US without driving?
Incessant NIMBYism is a grassroots phenomenon all around the West and stops or at least enormously increases costs of many projects that could otherwise be built cheaper and quicker.
We are still paying the price for the 1960s, when highways were built right through residential neigbourhoods without asking the locals. Now, as a consequence, every construction project gets analyzed and litigated to death.
Plus, people in the US don't seem to want new passenger railroads that much. It might be a vicious circle - no decent railroads, therefore no experience with decent railroads, therefore no desire to build more decent railroads, therefore no decent railroads. But the initiative, or lack thereof, still seems to be emanating from the people.
Space is trivial in comparison. No one lives there and if you can overcome the technical problems, you can build anything anywhere without facing environmental litigation from 30 different groups.
Throw enough money at it and it doesn’t matter /s
The reality is that it’s obviously a political issue. But I dispute it’s “simply” a NIMBY issue. I think it’s a political and social issue of a different kind -inspirational and aspirational.
The space race was a crazy time in America and all Americans wanted us to build a rocket even if it didn’t really do much for the average Americans life. Most Americans don’t care about transit, like you said. Transit is a hard issue but it’s not a big TV spectacle type issue, nothing to brag about, just a slow persistent grind.
I don’t think it has to be that way. For example, myself, and a bunch of coworkers and friends have recently visited Japan on independent trips. After doing so, everyone said they wished America built trains like the Japanese. It’s simply that Americans aren’t familiar with good trains and what that can mean for QoL. Japan has spent a ton more money, as a function of GDP, and a ton of that went to their citizens’ QoL. If America was racing USSR to build the world’s fastest cross-country bullet train, I think more Americans would support it, and every town would be clamoring to have a stop on the “freedom rail” (or however it was spun). Which is a shame, because trains would improve the QoL of a lot of people compared to rockets.
The top reaction on this thread almost refutes itself. Were this a story about autonomous rovers being ordered, I doubt anyone would blink an eye. But because it’s about even studying trains, we have complaints about cost.
> not like we need billions in R&D
But it does cost us billions more to do with trains what our peers have done.
Two, we passed a billion dollar infrastructure bill for exactly this a couple of years ago. Were you aware of this? What more do you want?
https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/house-bill/3684
Discussing things like this on HN too often consists of people arguing based on what they assume is true without knowing what they want already exists.