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travisb

From the article in no particular order:

- We don't spend enough money

- We have a low tolerance for risk

- We choose high-tech, finessed designs over simpler, heavier designs

- The project is designed and built by international committee

It sounds like a recipe for failure to me. I'm skeptical that the USA will ever again land humans on the moon because the USA seems unable to spend enough to succeed by brute force and the supposedly cheaper finely engineered designs don't seem up to the rigours. For example, putting computer everywhere is common engineering practice these days, but modern computer chips (even the space hardened varieties) cannot be as robust as TTL logic from the 60s. Yet it sounds like a career ending event to suggest that the critical computation be done (and limited to what can be done!) purely in TTL logic.

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Ingenuity was powered by bog standard 18650 batteries and mostly commercial off the shelf components. Only the two redundant flight controllers were radiation hardened. The rest was built from things you can order out of digikey.

Somehow that managed to vastly exceed their planned missions, proving the worth of that mode of exploration for future missions.

Why would we ever revert to old expensive, heavy TTL logic systems that virtually nobody alive understands when the better bet is designing systems with hardware you can buy on AliExpress?

For space to be more accessible we should be iterating with regular “stuff” and not crazy one-off designs. Sure some parts of each mission require crazy, like the propellers on ingenuity but that’s the whole point. Spend your budget on the crazy stuff that actually needs to be crazy.

It turns out there isn’t much on the Moon anyway, just rocks and dust, and now a couple flags. The value was the science done along the way to get there.

Now, that science is done.

Using TTLs seems less interesting in general(?). It is nice to be able to send computers into space. NASA should just use computers instead of TTL, if for no other reason than that keeping the infrastructure for those sorts of computers well funded is valuable.

I'm interested in learning more about your perspective that there's no science left to be done on the moon.

Do you think establishing a human base on the moon has value?

Maybe it was unclear, I meant, tautologically and just for emphasis, that the science that was done for the previous mission was (of course) done.

> Now, that science is done.

That said, building a base on the moon is pretty pointless, and I think we shouldn’t do it. If we’re going to become a spacefaring species, we’re going to have to learn how to live in space. The conditions on each planet, moon, whatever, are all pretty different, so we’ll probably need different bespoke solutions on each one.

We should perfect the art of building self-sustaining orbital habitats, because those aren’t redesigned from scratch every time. Let’s iterate on the space-station.

Energetically going downwell is a big cost. The only reason to go onto a planet is to get resources that aren’t already present in less energetically disadvantageous locations.

There are a lot of great benefits to planets, protection from radiation and meteors being among them, also a free source of gravity which is pretty important to us as a species.

It is a free source of, like, some amount of gravity. But we don’t know how our biology will respond to the wrong amount. Meanwhile an orbital habitat can be spun to get us the right amount.

In order to get to a planet in the first place, you’ll have to have a ship that can fly through space without the occupants getting irradiated. The biggest problem will be convincing them to get off the ship I think.

You're right, we may have to find out how the British, French, and Spanish convinced people to get off the ships during the colonial eras.

In the colonial era they were mostly colonizing already populated areas. The land was mostly more hospitable than the ship because

* Humans evolved to live on Earth

* In many cases there were people to trade with or steal already tended land from

We could look at Arctic expeditions I guess. They mostly didn’t colonize for some reason (despite the region being wildly more hospitable than anywhere off Earth).

I think we can both agree that the reality is any sort of off-world colonization is going to be unpleasant and difficult beyond imagine with no simple solutions. I think we are much closer to being able to construct conformable habitats on other celestial bodies than we are to being able to make megastructures in outer space. Long term artificial structures will probably be the way to go, but I think to get there we will need to be able to setup base camps on nearby celestial bodies.

The moon gives no protection from radiation or meteors.

Sending mass from the moon to earth is energetically positive and you can build mass drivers and space elevators on the moon that are only powered by electricity. So assuming an ambitious space program, there is every reason to do this, except that it costs money.

I went for a brief swim in the ocean once and having not seen any fish I concluded that the ocean must be devoid of life.

Elaborated here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41570028

Colonizing the moon makes as much sense as swimming out to a rock a bunch of times, to prepare for piloting a cargo ship.

Because when we do science on earth we go to a place once take only a few samples and that's it. And then maybe every 10-20 years we might take another sample or something.

We have less data about the moon then any even half way interesting cave on earth.

The post I was responding to was arguing for using low-tech systems and lots of power to get to the Moon again.

We know, and they knew at the time, that the achievement of getting to the Moon was just a cherry on top of the technological development required to do it.

Should not redo that work. The current strategy of using higher-tech components and less brute force is more scientifically interesting.

I also think going back to the moon is stupid, but I elaborated on that a bunch the other branch, so I’m not going to bother doing it again. But if we have to go back again, we should follow their spirit rather than their actions and use the most advanced systems available. Not a bunch of TTLs. The value is in testing our ability to manufacture complex devices to work in a hostile environment.

We could easily send a bunch of low cost probes to the Moon to collect more data. We can even get samples back robotically - China did that earlier this year.

There's no need to spend billions on spending three or four people there to get scientific returns.

Building a architecture to sustainably send human places will also enable a lot of other things. Having a 100 ton lander allows you to send far more then tiny probes. And we know well that actual humans exploring and looking for samples is better in many ways.

Getting humans to have long term sustainability and mobility on the moon and having tools and robotic support is long term.

The same architecture can then be reused for Mars.

On earth, most caves are explored with humans. Most science is not done by robotics only.

> but modern computer chips (even the space hardened varieties) cannot be as robust as TTL logic

I don't really get this argument. If this is a blocker I'd assume Nasa to be smart enough to understand it and propose an adequate solution...

yeah. you can still buy a lot of ttl chips new (actually i think the agc used rtl, but ttl would be fine), there's new old stock of the others, and if that's not enough, teenagers can fabricate 10-micron chips in their garages nowadays

this is not the problem

And all of these are wrong. NASA budget is bigger then the rest of the world combined.

Low risk tolerance isn't a really problem.

High-tech is actually good and these mythical cheap heavy designs don't actually exist. SpaceX is building Starship and Raptor not SeaDragon. This is just the old 'Soviet tanks are cheaper nonsense repackaged for Space'.

The 4th is a problem, but not actually the biggest problem.

The real issue is that NASA doesn't get a goal and money. Each program is individually controlled by congress, budget is strictly allocated to certain program.

When a former NASA administrator even suggested to do something that would hurt a important program, and make it much cheaper he was instantly threatened with firing and told if he continued to publicly talk about it, he would be removed. He in fact suggested he should just resign.

And this suggested change wasn't even a very hard attack compared to what NASA SHOULD actually have done.

If you spend 30 years and 60 billion $ achieving basically nothing and congress is incredibly happy with the program, you know you have a totally broken system.

Chips are plenty save in space, this isn't that big of a problem and doing all this logic in TTL wouldn't make sense.

You said a whole lot of nothing and no conclusion... What is your point?

Try reading it again.

Though it might fall under the umbrella of not spending enough money, I'd add that we haven't been meaningfully iterating on the technology and processes involved. One might even argue that traditional aerospace has been trying its hardest to reduce the amount of iteration/refinement going on to the barest of minimums.

This has kept crewed spaceflight stuck in a rut in terms of cost and risk. It's like if progress on the design of commercial aircraft suddenly slowed to a crawl in the late 1940s, putting us at mid-60s adjacent aircraft design in 2024.

It can be done, it was done, but it doesn't scale.

If you want layers of failsafe and redundancy (as we would do it today), it requires higher level abstractions, e.g. writing in at least C if not C++ or Rust, instead of hand-coded assembler like they did back then.

So yes simple got us there, but it's not useful to repeat the exercise like that again.

This really proves my point.

I suggest that maybe the key to success is limiting ourselves to simpler TTL logic and make up for it by adding 10% additional material. Immediately somebody responds that TTL logic is the old way and can't be as good as modern C, let alone Rust.

So now instead of a few hundred large, durable transistors and relays which shrug off radiation and heat and voltage spikes and a have few enough states that they can be formally proved correct, we need delicate 30+ MHz microprocessors which need special radiation hardening and which will go up in smoke if their signal lines transiently exceed 10 volts, and runs a couple million lines of code.

The arguments here for Rust aren't even wrong, which is the problem. In theory Rust would be better than TTL logic in every way: easier, cheaper, lighter, more capable, more logging, updatable. Professionally TTL is an argument which can't be won and is therefore career limiting to make, so finesse wins out.

Yet large projects of every type keep 'mysteriously' failing due to "unforeseen difficulties".

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