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Comment by teraflop | Hacker News Reader

How does any of that matter for this mission, which will not be landing on the moon?

Because many small steps are required before every giant leap.

I would like to point out that the current misadventure in the ME has cost at least $38,035,856,006 in 32 days. And that won't receive half of the "this is a waste of money" critiques this mission will. And there are a ton of people who are against that excursion.

Most people who will come across this will react with either extreme negativity or indifference. Very few people will react positively. This thread itself is evidence of that. This is a nerdy community filled with people who are deeply positive about space exploration and excluding my comments, the straw poll was,

    ~81 positive (48%), ~43 negative (25%), ~45 neutral (27%).

Only a plurality of comments were positive. 88 comments were neutral or negative.

When I see numbers like that ($38 billion) thrown around I always wonder: Where did that money go? In the best case, it stayed in the economy in the form of salaries and such. In the worst case, it goes directly into an offshore pile of mega-wealth where it won't benefit the economy and likely won't even be taxed. Is there any way to determine where on this continuum this program stands? I'm guessing the 1960s space program, while incredibly expensive, was firmly on the "money stays in the economy" side.

That kind of money, even if it goes to a single person, doesn't get taken out of the economy. No one puts it under the mattress. It's invested, so it's basically given to other people in exchange for a promise of equity / future returns.

It might not be the allocation of capital we like, but it doesn't disappear.

Well, there is a financial 'sink' - stockpiles and ammunition or other non-reusable military gear are basically the definition of money 'destroyed'. Their political value is almost non-existent actual money. If any, at all.

> stockpiles and ammunition or other non-reusable military gear are basically the definition of money 'destroyed'

Goods like longer-lasting food, medical supplies or a strategic oil reserve are not wasted. The money that went into supplying them has gone back into the economy, and they serve a more strategic purpose than the market participants could have borne (i.e. societal insurance policies). The same could also be said of military stockpiles, and continuing to buy them sustains a capability that is hard to get back once lost.

Those stockpiles weren’t created by putting money into a shredder and getting ammunition out. They were created by paying for the materials and labor. At that point the government’s money is frozen and stockpiled, but the economy still has the money that was spent.

> No one puts it under the mattress. It's invested, so it's basically given to other people in exchange for a promise of equity / future returns.

You make wealth concentration sound like a good thing somehow. This was publicly collected tax money, that will go on to enrich some already rich douchebag.

How will it go on to enrich someone else?

Invest in a company, collect dividends or capital gains.

A lot of it is in between: it goes to building things that get unbuilt shortly after.

> How does any of that matter for this mission

This is a fair question. The closest answer I can get is eyes and ears onboard complement sensors.

It's also rehearsing/testing/experience gathering for an eventual mission that will land people on the Moon again. Missions don't happen in isolation.

> Missions don't happen in isolation

True. I wasn’t thinking about training the ground crews.

Only in the last few minutes, the livestream actually covered various goals this mission - explicitly a test mission - is meant to achieve. For example, one they just mentioned is they're going to be doing some docking maneuvers practice.

This is not just training the current flight crew and ground crews, but is also generally testing the entire system - including operations and hardware too, with feedback important to logistics and component manufacturers, etc. With possible exception of Falcon 9 launches, space missions are still infrequent enough that each of them is providing knowledge and experience meaningfully relevant to all work in and adjacent to space exploration and space industry.

> testing the entire system - including operations and hardware too, with feedback important to logistics and component manufacturers, etc.

This can be done autonomously. The human training cannot.

Not just yet. Give it a few more years for AI (haha, another thing yielding stupid amount of value to everyone, that people are totally oblivious of - your antibiotics comparison in another subthread kinda applies too) - but for now, having actual people with full sensory capabilities, able to look at stuff on-site (and hear, and smell), is something we can't fully cover with computers and sensors. We can recover that and more data later, but it's a delayed, after-the-fact analysis. There's value in immediate feedback and immediate decisions.

> for now, having actual people with full sensory capabilities, able to look at stuff on-site (and hear, and smell), is something we can't fully cover with computers and sensors

Is this really helpful for a tech validation flight? We can put those sensors onboard.

> We can recover that and more data later, but it's a delayed, after-the-fact analysis. There's value in immediate feedback and immediate decisions

To a degree. We’ve validated vehicles remotely for LEO enough times that I’m sceptical we need humans for that. (Again, we do for ground-crew interaction training.)

To test the stuff that will allow to land humans on the moon

More like to test the stuff that will take them to the ship(s) that will allow humans to land on the Moon.

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