John Carmack discusses SpaceX strategy and Mars
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The choice is obvious.
In my opinion, after a certain point, will become an economic necessity; i.e. a lack of resources on earth & cheaper manufacturing costs in space will drive humanity spacebound.
If we have a viable self-sufficient colony outside of Earth (even on the moon or in space) humanity has a better chance of survival if we manage to mess up our planet too badly to fix.
I still can't think of what sequence of disasters would lead to Earth being less habitable than Mars. Earth still supported life the day after the meteor hit. To bring Earth down to Mars level something would have to remove all the atmosphere, remove all the mineral resources, remove the oceans, and screw up gravity and the diurnal cycle.
And nation states operate based upon the population's support. If the population was clambering for a mars trip, we'd do one, but without that support, it just won't happen.
I dunno, I'm just saying: I'm passionate about this stuff.
And yet IDGAF about putting people on Mars. Mars is a dead wasteland. It will always be a dead wasteland. It's freezing, there's radiation, there's very little atmosphere. Life on Mars would be so far beyond bleak that it's beyond imagination. There's no science humans can do there that probes can't do better for a given amount of money. There's also a much higher risk of accident and death than the moon landings, and such things have a potential to be huge net negatives for the whole space effort. Aside from billionaire tourism it's hard to imagine any economic benefit either, though I agree that shouldn't be a hard requirement for scientific progress.
If we had a way to get there and back and put settlements there cheaply and safely it might start to seem more exciting. That can never be a reality with current propulsion technology. Maybe in 50-100 years if fusion becomes a thing?
For better or for worse, the equivalent race right now is in AI.
... Eh? No they didn't, certainly not by the time people were looking at the moon. By then the nuclear doctrine was very well established. The space race was primarily about _prestige_; it was a propaganda thing. That's why it was dropped so completely once the arbitrary goal was reached; little technology from the Soviet programme and virtually none from the US one were used after both countries reoriented around lower-cost space programmes.
I'm not entirely sure they knew it at the time, though. It was likely a bit of a land grab as well?
The moon is potentially a treasure trove. Bringing anything back to Earth is obviously the challenge because of the energy expenditure but in the 50s and 60s they were considering nuclear-powered craft (Project Orion) and at the time, mining the moon probably seemed like it might have been feasible in the next 50 years.
little technology from the Soviet programme and virtually
none from the US one were used after both countries
reoriented around lower-cost space programmes.
I'm open to correction/clarification; I'm not an expert obviously.
It was _informed_ by it, but, for instance the Saturn V's kerosene and hydrogen engines, developed at absolutely horrendous, unthinkable expense, on the justification that it was the moon race and that the cost would be amortised over expected hundreds or thousands of Saturn launches in the future, were thrown away (reusing the hydrogen one occasionally comes up as an idea, but has gone nowhere so far).
Same for the Soviet stuff, to a large extent; the N-1's engines, also very sophisticated, were essentially abandoned (though a derivative was used a long, long time later in a Soyuz launcher). The Soviets did at least keep the Soyuz orbital vehicle (originally developed for their moon programme), but little else.
This all made sense at the time; there suddenly wasn't much money, so reverting to the less capable, less complex, arguably by then previous-gen launchers was rational. But it was really a demonstration that, by then, neither state took any of this at all seriously (even before Apollo 11, the Soviets had all but abandoned their programme); if it had really been seen as a matter of national security, the Saturn C-5N and N1F and all the rest of the planned evolutions would have launched in their hundreds.