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Comment by sktrdie | Hacker News Reader

Isn’t it simple economics? There’s no incentives

Perhaps entertainment might fund it? Like a reality show on the moon? Still doubt it will finance billions

Yeah, I feel like the answer seems most likely to be "no one gets excited over going to the moon the nth time". With Apollo, it was something we had never done before, and I imagine a lot of people genuinely didn't know if it could be done, making it a huge achievement for humanity. Nowadays, people grow up learning that we already have done it, and "do the same thing we did in the 1960s in the 2020s" isn't an exciting enough achievement to get the public at large interested (and would make any failures even more embarrassing).

I feel like that's a big part of it.

I love the idea of spending tax money on R&D, but what would we accomplish on the moon at this point? Seems better to spend on telescopes and space stations until we have firm plans for what to do on the moon.

Yeah, I feel like the answer seems most likely to be "no one gets excited over going to the moon the nth time".

All the people asking 'why can't we go to the moon' would definitely get excited. Plenty of people get excited every time SpaceX has a successful launch or achieve some innovation, but somehow you've convinced yourself that 'people on the moon' is fundamentally boring and nobody is interested.

Do you really think there's as many people as excited about SpaceX launches as there were people interested in the space race in the 60s? I'm not sure why you're assuming what my opinion is on this; I'm talking about people in aggregate, which is what matters in terms of the government investing heavily in it like they did before.

NASA has plenty of budget and is not driven by demand.

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