> It feels like the moon is well within humankind's reach by now.
It has been for the last 65 years. ;)
It has been for the last 65 years. ;)
That's huge progress!
If that made it "out of reach" back then depends on what you mean with those words, but it's undeniably far cheaper and safer now.
FireFly launched as a private company on a Falcon 9 so their cost was probably a peak of ~$0.07 billion (to maintain units) which may have been able to be privately negotiate downward given the nature of the mission.
Smallest lunar lander so far is 200kg/440lbs, that's the weight of a carry on full of lead. Besides the Space Shuttle can't go higher or deliver higher than LEO anyway.
You're right that Space Shuttle was a nonstarter for technical reasons, but it doesn't change the core issue. Neither does the mass. Unless you can find other companies willing to share a launch with you, you're paying for a whole rocket. And that's if you can manage to contract a rocket in the first place. As an inconsequential nitpick, no lander weighs 200kg. You're conflating landing mass (of which there's been well smaller than 200kg) with total launched mass. Fuel, thrusters, and so on multiply the weight substantially.
Now that we've clearly nailed all 4 of those points, we're starting to see lots more interesting things in space from tourists visiting the ISS, people sending their ashes to space, to doing private space walks and going further into space than any human has since the 70s [1], and now even things like this with a private company landing a payload on the Moon. Many of these things are done with no return beyond doing them.
More specifically though, this is also literally why SpaceX was created. Elon was researching NASA's plans for getting men to Mars. They literally did not exist. He wanted to get society more interested in space and so his idea was to launch a greenhouse to Mars and live-stream it. The capability for that simply did not exist in America, and in Russia the costs were far too high. So SpaceX was born.
This is why the image of the Moon as a stepping stone to Mars doesn't really make any sense. The Moon is very much 'hard mode', but it's closer. So the main tech issue to make up (long distance travel) is not one that progress on the Moon will go much towards advancing.
This is made even true on the Moon because its low gravity means that even a hair of velocity is going to make you 'bounce' after landing. This is why things like probes and rovers landing (or at least ending up) on their side or even upside down on the Moon is a fairly frequent affair. On Mars (and other places with an atmosphere) you can use atmospheric braking which is essentially just slowing down by bumping into the atmosphere in a controlled fashion. You can even get things like parachutes involved in the process.
The dust storms in Mars are also 'fake' at least as presented in movies/books like "The Martian." Mars has an extremely low atmospheric pressure (relative to Earth) so fiercest dust storm imaginable would feel like nothing more than a slight breeze. The only issue they pose is visibility, and dust accumulating on solar panels. Andy Weir, by the way, was well aware of this when writing "The Martian" which is otherwise a phenomenally well researched hard sci-fi book. I think it's highly telling that he had to intentionally fudge reality to create a crisis on Mars!
Rescue and abort options are also much harder. The moon is close enough to easily resupply or rescue people on the surface, mars is much harder.
But if somehow both of these bodies were orbiting around Earth, Mars would be just orders of magnitude more straight forward than Mars, and I think it's relatively likely we'd already have permanent outposts, if not colonies, there. So the mental model of it being viewed as a stepping stone is somewhat misleading. The Moon is hard!
And also I don't think the distance will be that bad. We've already had 374 day ISS stays which is far longer than any possible transit to Mars (though nowhere near as long as a late-stage mission abort would entail) and the overall effects of such a stay were not markedly different than significantly shorter stays on the ISS. So it seems very unlikely that even a late stage emergency abort would be fatal.