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Comment by dylan604 | Hacker News Reader

What else are you looking to see from such deep space? Nothing we launch will ever reach anything anything interesting in probably the life of humanity. Just to get to Pluto in our life times meant going so fast that it could only fly by. Maybe flying around in the Oort cloud might, unlikely though, be interesting.

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Exoplanet closeups?

You can use the sun as a gravitational lens: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_gravitational_lens

You need to be about 550 au out.

whoa... why aren't we doing that?

Even cooler is setting up transmitters and receivers at suitable spots on opposite sides of two stars.

Veeger is currently less that 200 AU, and it's dying. For us to build a craft that could stay alive long enough to make it to 550AU and still be functioning would take an incredible leap in technology. This plan also has a fatal flaw in that you can only ever hope to look at one thing. You can't just slew that craft to be able to line up the next target.

You mean V'ger

https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/V%27ger

Observing the heliopause at different locations would be interesting. The two Voyagers and New Horizon are all headed more or less through the bow. We still have a lot of uncertainty about what shape the tail of the heliosphere is, not to mention many other details.

The best time to plant a tree is 50 years ago. The second best time is now.

The best time to plant is when the conditions are right for the planting. If you've never planted seeds in less than ideal conditions, it'll be hard to understand. At the time of Voyagers, the conditions were right in a way that only happens every 175ish years. Anything now and since would have been less than ideal conditions to the point the newly launched craft would not be as performant as Voyagers.

If we're waiting around on planetary alignments to do missions things we could do in decades will end up taking centuries. Speed isn't the only metric that matters; in the meantime we could be testing alternate forms of propulsion from lightsails to nuclear propulsion.

I'd argue there are `50 years / planck time` better times to plant a tree than now.

It's the same notion that has us going "back to the moon" right now. The US did something impressive and interesting several times. In the absence of anything else impressive and interesting now, we're trying to pull the same trick again. As if we're going to arrive on the Moon's surface and suddenly discover it isn't a barren sphere with a rocky surface, no atmosphere & tiny amounts of water on it.

There's a reason why Apollo was cancelled. Putting people on the moon is interesting in the context that it was accomplished. Putting people on the moon today is like that friend who won't stop talking about how we was on the football team in senior year and they went to the state championship.

BS. We've discovered there's significant amounts of water on the Moon, we could be investigating that. We could be setting up real time cameras there to observe earth 24/7. We could be doing experiments with atomic clocks to check how orbital periods vary, and many more. We could be building launch infrastructure there. we could be investigating lunar geology, such as underground lava tubes whose existence has been confirmed but about whose interiors we can currently only theorize. It's absolutely absurd that we have several active rovers tootling around Mars and non on the Moon.

This argument that 'we went there already, there no reason to go back' just demonstrates a lack of imagination, at best.

Putting people on the moon today is like that friend who won't stop talking about how we was on the football team in senior year and they went to the state championship.

No, that'd be talking about how much we achieved with the moon landings while doing little else since.

A permanent moon base has real practical benefits. Most likely a key prerequisite to manned missions further than orbit.

so a pre-req to another useless goal?

We've been building race cars for a long time, but every time a new one is built they give it some test/practice laps before actually entering it into a race. That's all Artemis is doing is working out the kinks of the new space craft. There are larger plans now, and you can't go from ideation of plan to completion of plan in one attempt. Each Artemis mission is testing and moving towards the next step. The people involved in Apollo are no longer around, so a new generation of people need to gain experience. The Apollo spacecraft are also not being used, so new equipment is being put through the paces.

If you seriously believe that there's nothing new to learn from continuing to study the moon up close and in person, then you're just deliberately being obstinate about the subject. Humans are explorers, and the moon is just the next closest thing to explore. You're "won't stop talking about" comment is also just lame. If the 1400s explorers had decided that continuing to sail the seas looking for new routes or new lands was like having a friend that wouldn't stop talking about their childhood experiences, then the colonists would never have left Europe.

A racecar is an instrument of competition using the bearing of human capability though. Each variation of the car, track, and driver changes the ceiling and floor of how competitive the human can be. Space travel and satellite landing does not have enough participants to make a competition, and even if there were so much of it is not based on human capability in the moment but on preparations done beforehand. The launch conditions are very narrow and specific, the humans are merely there to monitor because they don't have the capability to micromanage to the degree needed the way computers do, and the variations that can be performed in operation are small and few in number. There's value in all of it and it is a huge accomplishment each time a satellite landing occurs, but the scale, resources, and planning required make it wasteful and asinine to turn it into a competition.

> What else are you looking to see from such deep space?

Deep space itself - that's what the Voyagers are measuring.

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