Out of curiosity, why do you see this as a worthwhile endeavor?
My personal perspective is that the resources are better used for other purposes, but it's possible that I just haven't encountered some compelling reason yet.
My personal perspective is that the resources are better used for other purposes, but it's possible that I just haven't encountered some compelling reason yet.
Like sports, the objective is ultimately useless except as a showcase of what humanity has to offer, and people like to see that.
If the goal was just to flex on the rest of the world I would've much rather we focused on going somewhere new or returning to the moon in a more sustainable way
Isn't this the point of this mission? If your point is "it shouldn't take this much money", then I agree. But also point to almost everything else.
IMO the program is not optimized for cost or sustainability, it's optimized for creating jobs in various congressional districts. Of course that provides a certain amount of political sustainability to the so-called Senate Launch System.
I just don't see a future where NASA can afford multiple SLS launches per year to maintain a continuous Lunar presence
Early launches, yes, because SLS is a garbage heap. Later ones, almost certainly not.
After (and if) Artemis III lands on the moon and brings home the astronauts there seems to be very little planned on how we actually get to the moon base which NASA is claiming this will lead to, let alone the manned Mars mission that is also supposed to follow.
In other words, I think NASA is greatly exaggerating, and possibly lying, about the utility of this mission.
There is a lot of research going into in situ construction methods and even nuclear power plants on the moon [1]. (Which would be necessary to bootstrap eventual indigenous panel production [2].)
To me it’s encouraging to see this fundamental work being attacked than an endless sea of renderings. The reason you aren’t seeing heavy detailing, despite construction slated to begin with Artemis V, is we’re waiting for the launch vehicles. (“Any exploration program which "just happens" to include a new launch vehicle is, de facto, a launch vehicle program” [3].)
[1] https://www.nasa.gov/news-release/nasa-department-of-energy-...
[2] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-00971-x
[3] https://blog.matt-rickard.com/p/akins-laws-of-spacecraft-des...
> “History shows that when American science and innovation come together, from the Manhattan Project to the Apollo Mission, our nation leads the world to reach new frontiers once thought impossible,”
> Under President Trump’s national space policy
I smell politics and American exceptionalism, not science. There are a lot of could-bes in these statements as well, I have serious suspicions that these goals are not serious engineering. I am 99.999% certain that NASA will not build a nuclear reactor on the moon this decade, nor even the next decade. NASA is not giving me any signals they are capable of that.
You don’t think NASA and the DOE, together with Lockheed and Westinghouse, can build a reactor? Why? The major technical issues were largely de-risked with the 2022 solicitation.
It's nice that we can send humans to space and it's good to keep that capability going so that the knowledge doesn't die. But the unmanned missions tend to pull the weight of actually accomplishing useful things. Humans just get in the way.
Space isn’t financed “exclusively” by taxes, either.
Fwiw do share your concerns about the methods (sending humans on this specific mission is questionable, SLS is questionable compared to SpaceX approach).
And in this mission in particular, you can't divorce science from politics. NASA's budget was reined in by Trump 45 and his admin picked Artemis because a manned mission to the moon invokes a particular feeling and memory, not because it benefits science. The moon is a known quantity, and going there is not more valuable than the other projects the government could have spent $100 billion on.
Keep in mind, this is one of the most expensive single launches in history while there is a partial government shutdown and the rest of the federal government that does real research has been gutted by this same administration. So it's tough to talk about "scientific value" when it's obvious that this mission is doing little science at the same time the government has decreed it won't be in the business of paying for science.
If you’re angry about this dumpster fire of an administration wasting money and gutting research (I am too), the answer is to fight for better funding across the board, not to tear down one of the few ambitious programs left that’s actually pushing the boundaries on what we can do. NASA’s budget amounts to a rounding error and isn’t zero sum with the rest of federal science funding, these are separate appropriations.
And as I said, agreed on the concerns about cost and sending humans.
Only if it helps you to call this "science", I would say.
> advancing our engineering capabilities in space is advancing the science
In this case, we are advancing our engineering capabilities to make humans survive in space, which is arguably completely useless.
Not only that, but we keep focusing on the easier and fun part for engineers. A real problem for surviving in space is life support, see e.g. this: https://mceglowski.substack.com/p/a-primer-on-long-duration-....
But it is a lot less fun than sending humans around the moon in a ship that doesn't need them at all, isn't it?
Even in sports you do not get "nothing", it has certainty helped advance the field of medicine.
We seem to have lost the technology of going to the moon we gained from Apollo. So without an actual follow-up and a tangible long term plan I suspect the exact same will happen this time around.
In contrast, we kept the technology of doing robotic missions in space, on the moon, and even on other planets and even asteroids (the latter two have much to improve upon though).
Some of it. Much for good reason. What are you referring to that we’ve lost that we would want?
The Moon, I dunno, it’s at least in Earth’s gravity well so it isn’t like we’re going totally the wrong direction when we go there, right?
At best it could be a gas station on the trip to somewhere interesting like the Asteroid belt, though.
We are sending humans to (or around) the moon now, but it may just turn out to be a wasted effort, done solely for the opulence (or more cynically bragging rights / nationalist propaganda).
If we want to go to Mars, the Moon is a good place to learn. Simple things like how to do trauma medicine in low g; how to accommodate a variety of human shapes, sizes and fitness levels; how to do in situ manufacturing; all the way to more-speculative science like how to gestate a mammal. These are easier to do on the Moon than Mars. And the data are more meaningful than simulating it in LEO. If we get ISRU going, doing it on the Moon should actually be cheaper.
If we don’t want to colonize space, the Moon is mostly a vanity mission. That said, the forcing function of developing semi-closed ecologies almost certainly has sustainability side effects on the ground.
What I really want is for us to send a lander and a launcher to Mars capable of returning to earth the the capsules Perseverance has been collecting. I would love for geologists on earth to examine Mars rock under a microscope. I would want them to take detailed pictures of an exoplanet using the Sun as a gravitational lens. And I would love it if they could send probes to Alpha Proxima using solar sails to get there within a couple of decades.
None of these would benefit from having a moon base. In fact this moon base seems to be diverting funds away from missions with more chance of success and more scientific value.
I do. Plenty of people do. Plenty of people also think exoplanet science is useless. I disagree with them. It the arguments are symmetric to those against human spaceflight.
> certainly not an engineering challenge
…how? We don’t have the technology to do this.
> There is no reason for humans to live anywhere other then on Earth. We have more reasons to live on Antarctica or the deep ocean then on the Moon, Mars or Alpha Centauri
Strongly disagree. You’re describing disrupting biospheres.
> None of these would benefit from having a moon base
Of course it does. ISRU (and baseload launch demand) decreases costs of access to deep space.
> diverting funds away from missions with more chance of success and more scientific value
The science slakes our curiosity. The engineering slakes our needs. And they both benefit from each other. Claiming Starship and in-orbit refueling won’t benefit scientific missions is myopic.
Surely you must see the difference between expolanet science and dreams of space colonization. The former is actual science which further our knowledge of the universe with tangible results, and the latter simply isn’t. People who don‘t like exoplanet science may have their reasons, but people who don‘t like space colonization are simply being realistic. Because the former is science, the latter is science fiction.
Finally there is nothing about space refueling technology which requires a moon base, and especially not manned moon missions. If you want space refueling infrastructure manned moon missions is not the only way to get there, and probably not even the best way. I also have my doubts here. If space refueling is so important we would be doing it already. Sending fuel from earth in a separate lunch. A case in point James Webb was originally designed with refueling in mind. They dropped it from the final module because it simply wasn’t worth it.
There’s some gravity: the wrong amount. In space, you can at least get 1G with centripetal force.
In orbit, you are halfway to anywhere. On Mars, you’ve gone back down the well. Make sure to bring enough gas to get out again…
Mars is just a bunch of irradiated rocks. Bring your own ecosystem, and wait a couple thousand years while it installs.
The only thing Mars has going for it is that it’s really far away, so we can still pretend to entertain sci-fi plans about colonizing it. The practical next step for space colonies would be large investments in additional space stations, a step so imminently possible that the only way to take it seriously would be to do it.
I’m not pitching a specific destination. And I’m not pitching exploration to the masses. Most people on the planet never have and never will leave their home country.
If we want to go to space, we probably want a lunar base.
> There’s some gravity: the wrong amount. In space, you can at least get 1G with centripetal force
Maybe this is important. Maybe it’s not. We need physiological experiments.
> In orbit, you are halfway to anywhere. On Mars, you’ve gone back down the well
In orbit you’re perpetually nowhere. On a surface you have in situ resources.
> Mars is just a bunch of irradiated rocks. Bring your own ecosystem, and wait a couple thousand years while it installs
Maybe it’s age. Maybe it’s moving from New York to Wyoming. Maybe those are the same thing. But I’m more of a red Mars advocate today than I was when I read Robinson’s trilogy in my twenties.
> only thing Mars has going for it is that it’s really far away, so we can still pretend to entertain sci-fi plans about colonizing it
It’s mass and an atmosphere. That’s a lot to what Earth has going for us.
> practical next step for space colonies would be large investments in additional space stations
Practical next steps are lots of experiments in centrifuges and micro and low gravity. To fund and focus that you need a goal.
> In orbit you’re perpetually nowhere. On a surface you have in situ resources.
It’s the bottom of a dried-out well in the middle of nowhere, that’s not an improvement over just being in the middle of nowhere with a full tank of gas.
>> practical next step for space colonies would be large investments in additional space stations
> Practical next steps are lots of experiments in centrifuges and micro and low gravity. To fund and focus that you need a goal.
The at least semi-plausible goal is the asteroid belt.
> We are sending humans to (or around) the moon now, but it may just turn out to be a wasted effort, done solely for the opulence
My 4 year old is extremely excited to watch the launch tonight because it’s manned. I’d say a few billion is worth it if all it does is inspire a new generation of astronauts, engineers, and scientists.
> inspire a new generation of astronauts, engineers, and scientists
This is a good point. And I would like it to be true. However when you have to lie about (or exaggerate) the scientific value of the mission, that is not exactly inspiring is it. Your 4 year old could be equally inspired by the amazing photos James Webb has given us, and unlike Artemis, James Webb is providing us with unique data which is inspiring all sorts of new science.
We have the capability to do that. We don’t have the will to do it, but we have the technology. We don’t even have autonomous robots that are capable of building a moon base on earth.
> Your 4 year old could be equally inspired by the amazing photos James Webb has given us, and unlike Artemis, James Webb is providing us with unique data which is inspiring all sorts of new science.
He’s not though. People gather around as a family and watch manned space missions. It’s exciting in a way that a telescope or a probe isn’t.
They have certainly contributed to my formation as a future engineer.
A manned mission on the other hand is tangible in a way a probe isn’t. “See the big round thing in the night sky? There are four people going around it in a spacecraft”.
It isn’t a _complete_ argument in favour of manned missions- that has to account for the risk of the endeavour and reward of the science potential of having people there to react in ways robots can’t. But it’s hard to pretend that the inspiration pretty much everyone feels when they see manned missions is somehow achievable purely by robotic ones.
Why do you say this? What is the bottleneck you feel we are more than half a decade from?
Without oxidizing air, it is easier to extract metals from the Moon rocks.
There is little doubt that it would be possible to build big spaceships on the Moon.
However, what is missing on the Moon is fuel. For interplanetary spacecraft, nuclear reactors would be preferable anyway, which could be assembled there from parts shipped from Earth, but for propulsion those still need a large amount of some working gas,to be heated and ejected.
It remains to be seen if there is any useful amount of water at the poles, but I doubt that there is enough for a long term exploitation.
We should aim for the asteroid belt. Maybe we can mine them or something. It’d be less like a frontier and more like an offshore oil platform, but still, it is at least semi-plausible.
Let’s talk about this in terms of practicalities. The NASA budget for 2026, per Wikipedia, is $24.4B. I often find it hard to really reason about the size of federal budgets, and the impact on tax payers, but I have a thought experiment that I think helps put it into perspective. Suppose we decided to pay for the NASA budget with a new tax, just for funding NASA. And we did that in the simplest (and most unfair) possible way: a flat rate. Every working adult in the US has to pay some fixed monthly rate (so excluding children and retirees). Again, per Wikipedia, that’s around 170M people. Take the NASA budget, divide by 170M, and you get … $11.96/month.
Obviously, there’s lots of flaws in this. That’s not we pay for NASA, we have income tax as a percentage with different tax brackets. But it is a helpful way to frame how much a country is spending, normalized by population. And I think it puts a lot of things in perspective. $11.96/month is comparable to a streaming service. And we talk a lot about whether NASAs budget is better used for other purposes, but we don’t do the same thing for a streaming service.
Hell, look at US consumer spending: https://www.bls.gov/news.release/cesan.nr0.htm (note that that spending is in dollars per “consumer unit,” which is I think is equivalent to an adult US worker, but there might be some caveats). Based on that, the average US consumer spends around $26.17/month on “tobacco products and smoking supplies”. I just feel it’s a little silly to worry about the NASA budget when the US consumer spends twice that on what is objectively a luxury good. At least NASA won’t give you cancer.
Actually, we do. I just cancelled two of mine in the last hour, and I know many people who are serial join/cancel subscribers because they "talk a lot about whether the [monthly fee] is better used for other purposes".
That doesn't mean Moon shots are the best possible use of that budget. There are strong arguments for creating more space stations first, and then using them as staging for other projects.
Mars and the Moon are ridiculously hostile environments. Hollywood (and Elon Musk) have sold a fantasy of land-unpack-build. There aren't enough words to describe how utterly unrealistic that is.
Current strategy is muddled, because it contains elements of patriotic Cold War PR fumes, contractor pork, and more than a hint of covert militarisation. Science and engineering are buried somewhere in the middle of that.
They could be front and centre, but they're not.
At some point it may become cheaper to build a spacecraft on the Moon and launch it in interplanetary missions than to do it from Earth. It might also be useful to build some bigger telescopes on the Moon than it is practical to launch from Earth, because due to the pollution of the sky extraterrestrial telescopes become more and more necessary.
Despite the fact that there may be some uses for bases on the Moon, it is likely that those bases should be mostly automated and humans should stay in such bases only for a limited time, much like staying on the ISS. The reason is that it is very likely that the gravity of the Moon is still too low to avoid health deterioration. According to the experiments done on mice in the ISS, two thirds of the terrestrial gravity were required to avoid health issues and one third of the terrestrial gravity provided a partial mitigation.
So even the gravity of Mars is only barely enough to avoid the more severe health problems, but not sufficient.
For long term missions, there is no real alternative to the use of a rotating space station, to ensure adequate gravity.
While with underground bases on Moon or on Mars it would be much easier to provide radiation protection, there remains the problem of insufficient gravity. It may be necessary to also build a rotating underground base, at least for a part where humans spend most of the time.
to me it's inspiring and gives people something to cheer for. It also keeps a lot of people employed, productive, and at least has the possibility for new innovation. When looking at the mountains and mountains of wasted taxpayer dollars I dislike these the least.
Edit: remember the Kennedy speech — We choose to go to the moon not because it is easy, but because we thought it would be easy.
For-profits are of no benefit to society? Are SpaceX rockets a loser for society?
That remains to be seen. By giving Musk the prominence to set up DOGE and destroy USAID, they've indirectly led to the deaths of almost a million people.
By launching starlink, they're also increasing the amount of aluminum in the upper atmosphere, which may have catastrophic effects on the ozone layer.
SpaceX rockets also are re-usable, which is environmentally better. They also cost about 10% of what non-profit rockets cost to launch.
> they've indirectly led to the deaths of almost a million people.
DOGE is a non-profit entity. Besides, why can't other non-profit governments pick up the aid?
So it's a product that was bought and used to enrich a single person. Sure seems like a for-profit to me, at least in this administration.
[1] https://www.newsweek.com/usaid-elon-musk-starlink-probe-ukra...
[2] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politic...
[1] https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2024GL10...
[2] https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2024JD04...
> DOGE is a non-profit entity
You seem to be saying that non-profit entities are incapable of killing people? Or that it's fine if non-profit entities do kill people?
> Besides, why can't other non-profit governments pick up the aid?
I think you're being obtuse. An analogy: "Sure I turned off the circuit breaker that was powering the life support machines, but why couldn't someone else bring in a UPS and plug them in to that?"
P.S. I oppose patents.
More importantly, challenges like space exploration help drive knowledge and our economy; and are critical for national prestigue.
(And, most people don't focus on this, space exploration is a way for the US to demonstrate its military technology in a non-antagonistic way. There's a lot of overlap in space exploration technology and miliary technology.)
But sending a human? That feels more real. If we have the power to go alive to the moon, we also have the power to go even further. And we lost it, now we are reclaiming it.
And it doesn't matter to me what I think of the US government - this is progress for all of humanity. Also the comment section on the youtube stream is interesting - lot's of different flags are posted, sending good wishes from all around the world, low effort comments otherwise of course, but largely positive. (Very rare I think)
So, more rockets into space please and less on earth.
Well, people are often obsessed with rationality, and seek reasons to do something, but there is one reason that works almost for anything: just because. If we want to go forward, we'd better try a lot of things, including those that do not look very promising. We don't know the future, the only way to uncover it is to try. Did you hear about gradient descent? It is an algo for finding local maxima and to do its work it needs to calculate partial derivatives to choose where to go next. In reality doing things and measuring things are sometimes indistinguishable. So society would better try to move in all directions at once.
A lot of people believe that to fly to the Moon is a good idea. Maybe they believe it due to emotional reasons, but it is good enough for me, because it allows to concentrate enough resources to do it.
> the resources are better used for other purposes
It is much better use for $$$ than the war with Iran. I believe that the war have eaten more then Artemis already, and... Voltaire said "perfect is an enemy of good". The Moon maybe not the perfect way to use resources, but it is good at least.
Now, the military...
It unites Americans towards a cause.
The engineering advancements have commercial applications.
And at the most basic level, it's a jobs program. Look at how many Americans are working because of this.
Most of the other big news events are ones where people get severely hurt, and political ones where one partly loses.
With this, we can look up at the moon, and say "Humanity did that."
Sure, if we lived in a purely utilitarian world, there's some merit to the argument that space exploration is a waste of resources that could be more efficiently used elsewhere. We don't live in a utilitarian world though, and instead we have the same (and in reality much, much larger) amounts of money and resources that get spent on this moon mission being spent instead on bombing the Middle East with nothing to show for it other than an impending global economic crisis.
Could the money spent on Artemis be spent somewhere better? Probably, but how about we start with not burning through 38 billion (and rising!) on a farcical boondoggle of a military operation whose only effects so far are increases in the cost of literally everything? The first WEEK of the war cost 11 billion[1], but when it comes to NASA we're suddenly penny-pinching?
And that's talking pure monetary expenditure, without even going into the human lives lost, the lessening of sanctions on Russia (which will in turn cause even more suffering in Ukraine), or the halting of trade through the Suez, etc. etc. etc.
From where I'm standing, even if Artemis turns out to be a complete and utter disaster with not a single benefit of any kind coming out of it, the worst possible case scenario is a few astronauts die and we wasted a few billion (and I guess NASA gets shut down). That's of course us working under the assumption that there won't be a single novel scientific discovery of any kind, or that we will learn absolutely nothing from these missions.
The current unjustified war the US is waging on the other hand has already killed thousands of people, and will continue harming every single person on this earth through the economic fallout alone. The US is quite literally setting money on fire with every single bomb they drop over Iran. And the true worst case scenario that I can easily imagine happening is nukes getting dropped and all the consequences that follow from that.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/11/world/middleeast/iran-war...