A rough guide for going back to the Moon
research.ibm.com
research.ibm.com
In 2026, with all the benefits of a tech industry that has become ever more powerful, with endless money poured into innovation, our 'rough guide back to the moon' is an AI model that maps it. It's powerful and impressive, of course, and doubtless very useful to researchers, and space exploration is not a priority--all of that is true, sure.
But to have the fruits of 50+ years of technological progress result not in going back to the moon, or onto other challenges, but just a refinement in looking at the moon. Is this the best giant leap we can muster now? So much innovation and yet we lack a capability we used to have.
I know there are all sorts of ways to explain this away, but it still makes me sad.
Apollo - Cold war. USA must do it before Russia and win the space race. Money is not a restriction. USA did it before Russia and won the space race.
Artemis - Prove a multi-national program can function under financial, economic, political, and even technical restrictions. We can't simply land and observe, it needs to be a team effort under a tight budget.
Some of it.
Not first to the space, not first to the Moon, not first in human spaceflight, not first in spacewalk, etc.
It was like we lost the first 9 events of a decathalon and then won the 1500 and declared ourselves the winner.
The move of picking an advantageous finish line is easily countered by… picking an obvious successor finish line. If they’d stuck a base on the moon that’d have been a pretty compelling “actually, here’s the next finish line.”
Maybe they have some space-station based claim.
I think both sides broadly agreed on all of those as their "next big goal" (with slight question mark over the space plane, as you could reasonably say the Soviet programme was purely reactive).
The race ended after the fall of the Soviet Union (with the Challenger disaster being an additional factor), not because it had been definitively won.
And left to die in orbit.
Animals often die in experimentation and that’s usually the whole point of the experiment.
I agree here, but it’s not really a game with declared rules or something. I think the US won in a game of oneupsmanship. Rather than try to make up rules, we can observe that the US always lost by little enough to plausibly claim that there was another more interesting goal right there. Then, won on the goal where, for whatever reason, there wasn’t a natural follow-up.
Of course, getting people to believe that the next thing you go for is a natural follow-up is itself an exercise in PR or propaganda. That’s why I’m mostly curious about how Russians saw
> planetary landing, space station, reusable space plane, modular space station.
There are definitely candidates for what could have been the “next target.” In my perception these just weren’t something people were excited about. But I wasn’t born at the time and I’m American so I know I got a biased telling.
[1] - https://www.planetary.org/articles/1027-when-nixon-stopped-h...
This is nonsense. A trip to Mars would take a minimum of 6 months and could only be resupplied every 2 years. Mars has a tiny amount of water, virtually no atmosphere, and receives 700x more radiation than Earth. Mars colonists would be forced to spend virtually all their time underground working hard to keep themselves alive, being bored senseless because there's nothing to do for fun (besides electronic entertainment, I suppose), or both.
Keep in mind that the Apollo program only gave us about two weeks of human time spent on the moon's surface total. In no way were we prepared to go to Mars after Apollo. We couldn't have managed a round trip around Mars, much less landing there and creating a permanent colony.
The idea that we would have "parallel civilizations" not just on Mars, the easiest other planet to inhabit, but "throughout the solar system" is delusional. Are we talking about also colonizing Venus, a planet where the surface temperature is hot enough to melt lead, the wind travels at hundreds of miles per hour, and the atmosphere is composed of sulfuric acid?
The sad (?) reality is that humans evolved to live on Earth and if we ever permanently live outside Earth, it will in all likelihood be in a form no longer recognizable as human, whether it's due to our physical bodies being engineered to withstand the rigors of life on a foreign planet or because our consciousnesses have been somehow uploaded to machines.
I cannot enough recommend the book A City on Mars. It's written by two giant space nerds who are nonetheless clear eyed on the many, many, many challenges to creating permanent space settlements of any kind.
https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/125084292-a-city-on-m...
https://www.reddit.com/r/space/comments/18xmkp0/a_city_on_ma...
To start with Mars has practically endless water. That's rather evident on the poles, but we discovered back in 2013 that even the 'desert-like' images you associate with Mars, the surface regolith is surprisingly moist at somewhere between 1.5-5% water by weight. So a typical analog given there is that if you heated about a cubic foot of soil, you'd be able to evaporate out upwards of 2 pints (or 1 liter) of water. So the whole plot in "The Martian" about these esoteric things he had to do to just get water was just based on ignorance, which was the state of knowledge prior to 2013. Of course humans on the surface would have discovered this in a matter of minutes, but we're relying on probes and rovers - so instead it took us half a century.
Similarly, radiation on the surface of Mars is somewhat less than what astronauts are the ISS are exposed to. The huge numbers you're referencing are probably either from stuff like that book you mentioned, which is wrong about most of everything it claims and/or equivalently being quite misleading by e.g. referencing exposure levels during flight from a direct solar flare, which would indeed be quite toasty - but is something that can be easily worked around. Water itself, which we'll need to bring plenty of, works as an excellent radiation shield.
Near to every argument made in your referenced book, at least to the point that I was able to read, is mostly uninformed and/or disingenuous, but this already getting quite a bit longer than I intended. If you're into reading things that don't just confirm your biases then I might recommend this [1] book instead. And it's written by an aerospace engineer with an extensive background of research into the topic, instead of a comic book artist. That's not an appeal to authority, as there are plenty of people with no background in space who are extremely well informed. But it's also true that those who are misinformed, universally, have no relevant background in space.
Or you could use hypothetical a nuclear power power plant that would be incredibly expensive to build, ship, run and maintain on a foreign planet.
You were right about the radiation! Kind of. There's "only" 50x more radiation on Mars' surface than on Earth's. You said this was less than what astronauts on the ISS are exposed to. How is that a meaningful comparison? You're talking about people living their entire lives in this environment, and presumably making babies who grow into adolescents and adults, all the while threatened by an amount of radiation we have no idea if a human child could live through.
The atmosphere on Mars is so thin that exposure to it will kill you. The level of radiation is so high that exposure to it will kill you, unless you lived essentially your entire life underground or in a bunker. The cold temperatures will kill you. The soil has perchlorate in concentrations that will kill you. There's basically nothing to do there -- no walks outside without a space suit, no nature to look at, no living beings (except perhaps soil microbes that would be instantly destroyed in the process of extracting water) -- nothing more available there than here on Earth except looking at the stars and dying. [1]
Every argument I've seen people make for colonizing Mars in the near term has been emotional. The arguments are all the more emotional for insisting that they are rational. We have no idea if we could grow food in a closed system indefinitely, or reproduce in space or on another planet, and the amount of research going into these literally existential questions is close to zero. Nor do the billionaires who claim to be obsessed with getting us to be a multi-planet civilization seem to give a shit about them. Colonizing Mars isn't a plan; it's a meme.
Finally, there's no thought given to how to deal with inevitable social problems that will arise if there are large (1000+) populations away from Earth: what to do with people who have psychological breakdowns? how do you prioritize if more people need to be sent home than there's space for on a return rocket? what are your responsibilities toward colonists who need expensive permanent care? what if they can't survive Earth's gravity due to physiological changes from growing up off-planet? What if an entire space colony will never be self-sustaining and they need to be supported with expensive shipments of food and supplies from Earth forever -- who will pay? Or will we?
Look, if you want to colonize Mars or other planets because you think it's a cool thing to do, at least that's an honest, personal opinion. But if you think putting a ton of resources into going to Mars anytime soon is a good investment -- when we aren't even mitigating an ongoing climate disaster here on Earth, the one environment to which we are exquisitely adapted and which is non-existent literally anywhere else in the known universe -- then you are fooling yourself.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/sep/26/nasa-curiosi...
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Let me start with your water issue. It varies by area - the 2% came from Curiosity's region bearing in mind it moves at an aggregate rate of about about 1.5 miles per year. The up to 5% came from measurements from other devices on different parts of the planet. And in this goofy digital world we've created I think we're falling increasingly out of touch with the real world, and what we're capable of. You are implying generating 800C of heat is some technological issue yet a typical medieval style open forge and bellows can easily reach temperatures upwards of 1200C. Suffice to say there's a bit more refined methods developed in the past millennia!
The reason radiation levels matter is because radiation can do one of two things. If you have low enough radiation, then the worst you're looking at is something like a reduced life expectancy owing to increased rates of cancer. But high radiation can give you radiation poisoning and kill you in hours. Mars is much more of the former than the latter. For instance there's even one really interesting area on Earth - Ramsar, Iran. [1] It's a small town of a couple of thousand that has significant ambient radiation levels, with some smaller areas within it even experiencing higher than typical levels on Mars. You'd naturally expect that to, at the minimum, lead to increased rates of cancer but it based on limited data not only does this not seem to be the case, but there may already be radio-adaptive effects in play. It's phenomenally interesting!
The thing I'd make of this (and the water on Mars) issue is that it's impossible to know what you don't know. And right now we know basically nothing about colonizing other planets and ultimately I think the only way we're really going to find out more is by actually doing it. So for instance obviously fertility will be crucial, but all the experiments you do on Earth or the ISS aren't ever going to give you a definitive answer. You're only going to find out on Mars by actually doing it. And I think this applies to many of the issues you're mentioning.
The idea of trying to just work out everything at home, and then have everything go perfectly is what I would call the meme. It just doesn't work in the real world. This is precisely how SpaceX was able to go from a relatively broke startup to dominating the entire space industry. They worked towards the goal and tried their best along the way, but didn't let the possibility of failure get in the way of achieving success. And they ended up with not only the most efficient rockets in the world, but also have the best safety record as well. Kind of paradoxical in a way, but I think it also makes sense. In poker the best way to ensure you lose money is to try to avoid losing money. When fear of failure dominates your thought processes you, at some point, become incapable of making the best decisions.
I think some of the issues you bring up (as well as in the book you mentioned) are issues brought up just to have issues to bring up. So for instance, what happens if somebody goes crazy? To me this question is banal, because I just don't see there being any real discussion to be had. Obviously they'd immediately be locked up to ensure the safety of everybody else, and they'd be deported back to Earth at the first opportunity. Maybe there's some interesting nuance or whatever in these issues, but I'm not seeing it?
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramsar,_Iran#Radioactivity
As to reaching 800+ Celsius: This is a solved problem on Earth because we have an effectively unlimited supply of oxygen and fuel. Neither of these conditions is true on Mars, unless you count the (very toxic to humans!) perchlorate in the soil. Extracting potable water from Martian soil would be a non-trivial task just in terms of energy needs, much less the task of making the water safe to drink.
The radiation issue is a bigger deal than you let on. I did not know about Ramsar. It's interesting! But this is a town of only 2000 with people who may have adapted to its higher levels of background radiation over generations. Our hypothetical Mars colonists will not have that luxury. And Ramsar has, on average, "only" 10x more radiation than we have on Earth -- still only 1/5th what we'd have on the surface of Mars.
I'd also point out that you seem pretty blase about the long-term risks of radiation. If we're talking about real colonization, we have to consider the risks of literal, multiple lifetimes of radiation -- not just how it might affect an average person over the course of a few years or decades.
> The idea of trying to just work out everything at home, and then have everything go perfectly is what I would call the meme
I apologize if it seems like I'm saying we need everything worked out. That is a miscommunication on my part. But we need some working prototype of what could work -- which we don't. We've never even succeeded in building a self-sustaining closed system on Earth! Where it should be easy! Because it's actually really really hard! And the craziest part is, literally no one is even trying!
If we can't make a self-sustaining closed system work here there is no reason to believe we could do it on another planet. I know SpaceX is everyone's favorite model of "go fast and break stuff", but there's many reasons why that does not apply to space colonization. The obvious first reason is that blowing up a rocket is not as serious as accidentally killing a space colony.
Another is the (imo mistaken) belief that rocked design is analogous to space colonization. I'd hazard that space colonization is maybe 1000x more difficult than designing a real big rocket -- which is admittedly very hard! But there are a bunch of extremely important and difficult questions that advocates for space travel -- maybe even you -- seem totally uninterested in solving and hand-wave away.
Resources will be scarce on a space colony, at least for the foreseeable future. What if a baby is born with a pathology that makes their care too expensive? Will they be left to die? Or will they have a right to live indefinitely? Will their parents be forced to get sterilized -- or have future fetuses aborted -- if they are at risk of producing more children with the same pathology? Who decides who gets sent home? It's simple if someone has an extreme psychic break with reality. But what if it's someone with severe depression? Or borderline personality disorder? Will the colony get to vote people off the island like the ancient Greeks sent people into exile? And what if a trip home might kill the person in question -- a particular risk for people who are born on Mars and never experienced gravity on Earth? Do future colonists have the right to give people an effective death sentence for being mentally ill?
These are obviously problems that exists here on Earth! But the consequences are entirely less dire here. A person with severe schizophrenia can live on the streets here in the US and pretty much no one gives a shit. But if this happens on Mars, and that person is using resources that are already in short supply (think of a world where there's only enough water to shower for a few minutes a week, or to subsist on only a bare minimum number of calories), people are going to care a lot. What happens next?
The reason I'm largely dismissive of things like radiation is twofold. The first is because we don't "really" know what the effects will be. It's not like we've intentionally exposed healthy people, in a large enough sample, to ever increasing radiation and then measured the effects. What we do know comes from observational studies which are going to provide weak and likely confounded evidence, and/or animal studies. The other is because life expectancy on Mars isn't going to be high. There will be significant numbers of deaths during colonization because there always are. Even simple construction projects tend to involve deaths and we're speaking of a major construction project done on another planet in circumstances we have no experience in whatsoever. The conclusion one can come to from the radiation is that people probably won't have an 80 year life expectancy, but that was already very much a given.
Mars also will not be self sustaining for at least on the order of decades. The earliest experiments will obviously be geared towards 'in situ resource utilization' (ISRU) like scaling the Sabatier reaction, creating our own food, and so on - but these will be experiments and not necessities. The first voyages will bring enough food and other supplies to provide for survival and departure (and then some), independent of local resources, within the typical 2 years time frame. Ideally everything will go according to plan, but in reality it almost certainly will go wrong from day 0, and so that will be the assumption. The first habs themselves will also simply be the rockets we're landing in.
The other questions I again just don't see as particularly relevant, even moreso in the context of a scenario where death will probably be a rather more frequent visitor than on Earth. They're also mostly happy problems. By the time you're trying to decide how to e.g. treat offspring with obscure birth defects, colonization has already been a booming success, and we'll leave it up to the Martians to do what they think is in their best collective interest. It's very likely that different value systems will emerge on the different settlements of humans, and I think this is a very good thing. Trying to impose our values on systems that are unlike anything we have experience of would simply be both arrogant and naive.
https://www.reddit.com/r/AmericaBad/comments/1apgsc9/regardi...
That's either revisionist or ignorant (likely the latter, looking at cheap memes). The term was coined by American journos in the early 50's, and the actual events started in 1955, very publicly. And objectively speaking it never ended until the USSR crashed.
You should probably read something on the Soviet space program (starting with Rockets and People, for example), and the US one while you're at it. The Soviets didn't went all in on satellites. They simply returned to the original ideas Korolev & co had long before Sputnik ever flew, namely LEO modular assembly tech followed by manned circumnavigation of Venus (before the surface conditions were known) or Mars (after that) as a meaningful first step in deep space exploration. Which was pretty pragmatic and long-term thinking, although it's hard to say how realistic it was politically: they would have finished by the late 80's at best and securing the funding without propaganda-worthy progress wasn't a given. Regardless, they succeeded at actual LEO colonization, which was presumably "not space race" (I'm sure Space Shuttle/Freedom being a massive failure and NASA seeking Soviet expertise after the crash has nothing to do with that framing...).
Lunar missions, let alone single-flight ones without modular spacecraft, were a practical dead end and a distraction, the engineers understood that perfectly. The party however got successfully baited by JFK's advisors into the race they couldn't win because they still needed to close the "reverse missile gap" after the US panicked and closed the actual missile gap they imagined existed by building a ton of Titan IIs. The Apollo people were also in perfect understanding that the program had no practical followup and only existed for novelty, see anything written by Chris Kraft and Gene Kranz who were actual participants. STS was a colossal blunder and a setback as well, in practical terms, and it was obvious before the first flight.
The race was never limited to manned missions either. For example most of what we know about the Solar System comes from the JPL, which is hugely underappreciated. The Soviets only succeeded with Venus missions.
Although, to be specific, he did not say it was a race, but rather something the U.S. should strive for—even specifying a deadline.
Crewed landing is a massive achievement, but it being the finish line of the race is the US framing, primarily due to getting beaten in all other firsts.
They did start on many LEO space stations that the US had no good answer to, but its questionable if this was still the same race or a race at all.
Many people expected the race to just go on - lunar bases, Mars, etc. Given that nothing like that really happened post US landing on the moon, one could really say the race was over the final victory belonged to the US.
... or maybe just called some convenient events "space race" and refused to notice the others. Like a literal space colony circling above, for example. If you control the framing you control the reality.
Be realistic. You can support going to the moon. However be honest: there isn't much value from it and there are plenty of reasons to say we shouldn't.
The arguments are entirely romantic. But then, what exactly is life without romance? That's probably the single greatest loss of modern society; that we've been convinced nothing matters but the material and concrete.
Or in my case I just went to my local high school marching band competition, and got to hear some great music. YMMV on what you find more romantic.
However the context tends to include I'm being asked for fund the dreams of those people (via taxes) and that impacts my ability to fund my own dreams.
What??? I bet you consume large quantities of art and romance, like everyone else. Like look at the tremendous choices you have for entertainment.
Of course by work, I mean work directed by somebody else to serve their ends, in exchange for money to live your own life. If we could afford to have people work five hours a week and still maintain a functioning society, then surely it is a moral obligation for us to do that. If you decide you want or need to do some kind of voluntary work to keep your mental health intact, so much the better. And if those happy people want to voluntarily commit some of their energy to going to the moon for no reason, then good for them.
I really cannot imagine taking your position. Working less is the pretty much the only thing we should be putting energy into.
I wonder what this would look like. I feel like nearly all of mankinds greatest achievements are due to our current structure of employment or at being forced to do something at the behest of someone elses ends.
like out-of-control global warming, depletion of freshwater reserves, destruction of soil, mass surveillance, extremely uneven distribution of resources. I mean all previous innovations which were supposed to allow working less somehow never materialized in working less, and the quality of life improvements are greatly questionable, basically keeping the production-consumption machinery takes up all the surplus it produces, while depleting the resources we have.
The great achievements we have are much like the Moai statues on the Easter Island.
The bone evidence of pre-Columbian Indians in America is one of periodic starvation. For the colonists, the bone evidence is one of extremely hard labor and short lives.
America's poor have a higher standard of living than medieval kings.
Woah, really? More than cheap fuel, scientific research, social welfare, political work towards peace?
The only good thing I can think of that is actually directly caused by the way we employ people is that some things (delivery, food) are very cheap, cheaper than they would be if people worked at a sustainable rate. But that comes at the immense cost of the health and wellbeing of a vast underclass of people.
“the superfluous is highly necessary”
– Voltaire
Incidentally, we tolerate this kind of "slavery" just fine when we charge people rent for basic shelter. The cost of maintaining the asset (the house) is far less than the cost we actually charge people, so in your sense when I pay rent I am being enslaved by the landlord to support their lifestyle.
Finally, you brought up slavery. The guy I'm replying to just said "work is good". I don't think it's good that we make people destroy their bodies in amazon fulfilment centers. People know what's good for them, if they want to do work let them do the work they want. But to say "no, you have to do the work I want you to do" under the hypothesis that we have plenty of stuff to go around (and we absolutely do) is just sick.
I get fulfillment via work.
> Working less is the pretty much the only thing we should be putting energy into.
A life without purpose leads to sloth and early death.
Good for you. And I hope you never get laid off, burned out, or anything else.
I however do not get my fulfillment via work. I work to live, and I do [mostly] enjoy my work. However I have a very long todo list that I'm not getting done in part because I don't have the time to work on it (and in part because I don't have the money for the tools/parts I need)
Did you read the part where I said voluntary work is fine?
> A life without purpose leads to sloth and early death.
Almost no work provides the people doing it with a sense of purpose. People have a purpose in spite of work, not because of it.
The path to international air flight began with often suicidal attempts to flap our arms with various instruments attached and act like birds, with many thinking we'd never go anywhere beyond that. With space we're already a bit more advanced, yet we're far from where we need to be - and the only way we're going to get there is by going out and starting on a very long journey.
We didn't do anything in 1969. Landing on the Moon and leaving a flag is like seeing the Wright Flyer go 260m, waving a Mission Accomplished banner, and then quitting with that as the state of art of flight - a mildly interesting novelty that was, at best, a proof of concept.
Gathering more resources so the overlords can have more humans enslaved with shinier golden handcuffs, who can consume more so number line goes up is not a meaningful goal to pursuit, and robotic-only commercially rationalized spaceflight has only this to offer.
Scientific discovery, so we can have better simulations about things of no use or effect on us? Why? Taking people to places and utilizing the resources there, and building a more resilient humanity is a worthy endeavor, and while robots are useful for that, ultimately human spaceflight (or interplanetary/interstellar travel) is he goal, not having only a space industry.
The Jamestown colony relied on shipments from England.
> Building a self-sustaining colony is so far outside the realm of possibility that it isn't worth thinking about
And look at what America became.
Very funny!
The Earth has more land than mankind will ever need. The Earth has effectively infinite energy from the Sun. And most of the resources we need are derived from biological matter, which Space lacks.
People don't realize how rapidly fertility affects populations. Take a place with a fertility rate of 1. That means each successive generation (which tends to be about 20 years, or the the window of fertility for a gen - from age ~20 to ~40) will decrease in size by half, in a compounding fashion. So over 1 century, that's a 97% decline (0.5^5) in generational size. Extinction comes shockingly fast.
But the opposite is also true. So what's going to happen is that low fertility populations are simply going to go extinct. That's going to be just lovely for humanity as it also corresponds with higher income, higher education, higher liberalism, higher secularism, and so on. And the current high fertility groups will come to quickly dominate the world. So it's kind of amusing in a way that Biblical texts will indeed come to pass - you'll have groups like Amish or Haredi, the meek - who happen to have high fertility rates, indeed inheriting the Earth.
This is part of the reason fertility is, by far, the biggest crisis facing humanity today. All love to the Amish and Haredi, but I don't want the Earth to turn into a planet of overalls and sidelocks. Even that would probably be just liminal, but we need some sort of high tech, high intelligence, high fertility sect to emerge. It's probably going to require something to akin to a modern religion, though presumably without a deity. Or maybe the Mormons had it right all along.
So, SpaceX?
I get it though. This is just how naturalism looks like when runs out of arguments in its favor.
"The Earth has more land than mankind will ever need."
"The Earth has effectively infinite energy from the Sun.
I see no exaggeration, obvious or otherwise. Scientific consensus is that mankind's population is going to peak in the next century.
> mankind already needs more land than Earth has
By what basis? There's no shortage of land. There's a shortage of land close to popular population centers, and that tends to be the land that people want to live on most. But that's an inherent geometric and social problem which outer space definitely doesn't solve, in fact it makes it worse.
> more energy than Earth can spare
Earth doesn't provide energy, the sun does. Even fossil fuels, biomass and wind power were all originally energy from the sun. The exception is nuclear - Earth does have an unusually high concentration of heavily elements like uranium and plutonium.
The bottleneck has always been development and delivery, not availability of energy itself. On just the land the US currently uses to grow corn for ethanol gasoline, we could build enough solar panels to power the entire US. And I certainly don't need to tell you about nuclear - the only reason entire civilizations aren't already powered by it is the time and expense and risk of building the plants.
What energy does outer space provide? You have solar, which we have here, and nuclear, which we have here. (You also have a variety of ideas that exist in science fiction but not the real world, like dyson spheres - I surely hope you aren't referring to such as the basis of your arguments.) None of this is new, and none of this solves the problems of development and delivery, in fact it makes both problems significantly worse.
Love the (sorry, but greedy) take. Maybe we shouldn't expand infinitely. I don't see our species as that special. Maybe we should stay a bit modest, and errm, down to the earth in our ambitions.
Both humans and resources can't be in infinite number at the same time. Something can be infinite relative to other, and I like the current balance, thanks.
So again, it's a relativity, not a certainty.
...of a density so low that it is 0 on average.
space has practically infinite nothing.
I know the pretty pictures always show the planets all nice together, but in reality there's this huge, irradiated, projectile-infested nothing that you and I cannot deal with, even with current tech.
A SciFi generation ship could maybe do that to the closest stars before it fails completely - but we have reason to think those stars will have any planet we can terraform. (ignoring the ethics if life exists - we don't have the technology to detect life on other planets)
Mars is the only planet that could potentially support human life. Even then the best parts are about as nice as Antarctica - not very nice. Which is to say a catastrophic failure of life support gives you seconds to get the backup [scuba type gear?] working as opposed to guaranteed death. Mars is a lot smaller than earth and has much less energy (less sun). Thus there isn't much potential there.
Everything else we can reasonably reach is much harder to work with than Mars.
Face it, earth is all we get: make it last.
Why? Because it is low-value land due to monsoons turning the dirt into mud, and that dirt doesn't have enough minerals in it so agriculture is too difficult to bother with.
It has free oxygen. It has 1g gravity. You can fly there for about a thousand dollars instead of a thousand billion. The radiation might give you skin cancer, but won't kill you immediately. There's too much water. It has animals you can hunt and eat. Etc, etc...
Practically nobody wants to live there that wasn't already there for generations.
If the human race can't be bothered occupying land like that, then colonising Mars is so, so far down the list it isn't even on the same page, book, or library shelf.
We're just starting an energetic space exploration with appearance of better tools in the recent years. Getting to the Moon is relatively easy, and could be barely done with much more modest technology; now we plan a bigger scale program. Getting people to Mars is undoubtedly more complex, but still within reach of the existing - or almost existing - technology. Getting furter from Earth, while not immediately in the plans, may get just as possible and useful with time, and we shouldn't claim to know what could be our reasons tomorrow to visit, say, Ceres or Venus. There is no scientific impossibility for flying almist anywhere in Solar system - the matter is only in needs and economic costs. Our predecessors could be confused with our habits of flying between continents and islands the way we can and do today - similarly some of us may not see the immediate reason to leave Earth - that can pass, as past habits got changed to our current ones.
Moon was that in 1960s. Now we're talking about a McMurdo station, not a dash to the South Pole with temporary storages along the way.
For the record, I would definitely visit such a hotel, even better if it included a super high altitude railway, Jungfrau Railway style!
because flying helicopter up there is incredibly dangerous and nobody would be willing to do regularly for a job. In fact, only one person has ever done it just to prove that it could be done.
I mean, I don't know you, but I feel like most people are not truly considering the level of discomfort, such a visit would entail. Much less being on the Moon or mars for any extended period of time.
You would essentially be paying tens of thousands of dollars to be an agony for several days. I've done such things just to say i did in my 20's but not for that cost.
The moon is unlikely to be self sustaining - gravity is too low. In turn that means that earth will forever be polluting the earths atmosphere (CO2!) to supply it.
The experiments done on ISS suggest that for optimum health a gravity of at least two thirds of that of Earth is necessary, which disqualifies almost all the bodies from the Solar System, because they are either too small or too big.
On a rotating spaceship it is possible to create any level of artificial gravity. In theory, one could make an underground rotating living space on Mars, to increase the apparent gravity, but that would consume much more energy and it would complicate entering and exiting, in comparison with a rotating spaceship.
Obviously, something like this will not be built any time soon, but nonetheless an expansion into the Solar System is possible even without living on the surfaces of other celestial bodies.
> Face it, earth is all we get: make it last.
Recent sci fi novels I've ready have been really depressing because while maybe some colony planet is doing OK the Earth is a used up husk, and I'd like to think that we could have both: a planet we chose to make last and successful footholds on other bodies (water moons and water planets make more sense to me)
[1] New York Times, 9 weeks before the Kitty Hawk's first flight (https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/svc/tmach/v1/refer?pdf=true...)
After we run out of space on the ocean I suppose it will make sense to consider space colonies, but I think you are really underestimating the technical challenges.
We don't even know if it's possible for actual life just simply life itself, to exist anywhere except on Earth for any length of time. We have exactly one example. Earth. All tests to the contrary in space show that life dies for all kinds of non-obvious reasons when removed from Earth for any extended period of time.
I personally hope it's not true and I do enthusiastically watch the progress. However, math is really, really bad.
Farside radio telescope:
There is no reason the above cannot be maintained by robots, and many reasons it should be if we have it. We should also question if it is worth it.
Humans are going to walk on the fucking moon! How can you not be excited about that? There is value in pushing the frontier, in doing things at the limit of human technology, in seeing new worlds through human eyes.
Been there done that. Last happened in 1972, there is nothing exciting about it anymore. I have other things in my life that are exciting - things that really are exciting.
I just finished helping my local high school marching band's annual event - I got to hear a lot of great music which I find exciting.
I slept in the zoo next to the fishes with the girl scouts not long ago.
You can guess by the above the ages of my kids - which in turn implies a lot of other excitement.
There are plenty of other things as well. My local town art festival is exciting to a lot of people even though I didn't care enough to attend this year. There are a lot of museums, parks, concerts, ... in my local area to be exciting about. I have a shop full of tools for my various hobbies that I'm excited about. If you can't find a lifetime of things to be excited about withing walking distance of your bedroom you need to learn to enjoy your life more. (with apologies to the disabled who can't leave their bed)
Then again, that could be NASA trying to justify or make the best of a pointless program imposed on them by politicians.
An aside: Did anyone in the 1960s wonder at the bizarre choice of Apollo for a moon program? How is it that Artemis is still available as a program name?
The US put 5% of the federal budget into the original moon mission. NASA and SpaceX and the US Space Force combined don't spend anywhere close to that on R&D.
What did we ultimately have to show for the money poured into Apollo? I'm a big fan of space exploration but putting twelve people up there for a few days at a time is pretty small potatoes compared to, say, the creation of smart phones or vast improvements in solar power and batteries or a thousand other things that have been done since 1972. I can push a (virtual) button on a rectangle I carry in my pocket and be instantly on a video call with my mother who lives a thousand miles away. And I don't even have to pay by the minute. That's positively magical, and in terms of actual real-world impact on average people it's far more significant than moon landings.
"Following the use of integrated circuit (IC) chips in the Interplanetary Monitoring Platform (IMP) in 1963, IC technology was later adopted for the AGC.[17] The Apollo flight computer was one of the first computers to use silicon IC chips.[4][8]"
A lot of money went to IC technology thanks to that, directly leading to the phones you mention. It is quite likely that without just these specific Apollo investments into ICs, we would be quite a few years behind on computer technology.
For starters, you are on HN amusing yourself in your free time.
We have immense computing power now compared to 50 years ago. But that doesn’t help to escape the gravity well of earth. We’re still using the same chemical rockets to go to space, haven’t invented any new type of rocket drives
The problem with expensive launch in the past wasn't due to propellant cost.
(Unfortunately if you do launch from Earth, neighbors will likely by a bit annoyed).
And can then transition to more advanced stuff, like space resource extraction (so you can only launch important bits), launch loops/skyhooks/tether shenanigans in general, etc.
I mean until 1960 people expected to find whole civilisation or at least intelligent life on Venus and until 1964, at least some life on Mars. By then, it was too late to stop Apollo, but already no point to go anywhere else or expand Moon presence.
And this time, both countries are planning ambitious missions--not just flags-and-footprints, but bases and resource extraction (ice from the lunar south pole).
SpaceX Starship, the vehicle that will return to the moon, can carry 100 tons to the lunar surface--compared to less than 10 tons for Apollo. Moreover, whereas a single Saturn V launch cost almost a billion dollars to launch, Starship should cost a third the price. Effectively, we'll be able to deliver cargo to the moon for 1/30th the price of Apollo. That's real progress.
I've been following the space program since the 1970s and I have never been more excited about it.
I’m sure the technical challenges are much greater than how they are portrayed in the show. But certainly there has been a lack of will and optimism and imagination as well.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_missions_to_the_Moon#F...
I would argue that is something & that things are finally moving in the right direction for the Moon at a respectable pace. :)
* The Lunacy of Artemis – https://idlewords.com/2024/5/the_lunacy_of_artemis.htm
* Artemis II Is Not Safe to Fly – https://idlewords.com/2026/03/artemis_ii_is_not_safe_to_fly....
I get the achievement here: it's quite difficult to combine data from these various sensors into one. Is the "AI" bit referring to how that integration was done?
Going back into space will require doing so with a hard nosed commercial mindset. Things on that scale are done because they are profitable, not because of putatively higher minded considerations.
I think our collective spirit is in the best place it's ever been for actually going into space, it's just not the spirit you were probably imagining.
I've put a couple of resources here for you. The first one described the program from a neutral perspective (in line with what you ask - grounded POV to satisfy paranoia): https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/moon-landing/
This one is for people a little further down the conspiracy pipeline, and it debunks the various things that moon landing conspiracists like to talk about: https://www.iop.org/explore-physics/moon/how-do-we-know-we-w...
Both are worth a read!
Finally this is an excellent jumping-off point to understand the Apollo program in more detail, once you're satisfied that it did happen (if you don't think so, you'll reject the source out of hand.) https://www.nasa.gov/the-apollo-program/
The program itself was really, really, really cool and is worth reading about. A truly enormous achievement involving millions of people and an entire country's scientific and engineering capacity.
I've listened through those flights few times and it still each time takes me back to memories still giving me goosebumps. Especially Apollo 11 when I was nine year old kid listening tiny battery radio all nights at our summer cottage attic.
It is a fantastic site.
The resolution is to realize that Apollo was a dead-end stunt, not some universe-altering historical event. The lack of consequences was an inevitable result of the structure of what Apollo was.
Then all that went out the airlock & the whole thing devolved into a long-term unsustainable race. :P
It ended up that the government-contractor axis wasn't able to reduce launch costs, not due to technical reason, but political and institutional ones. There had to be a different approach, as pursued by SpaceX.
But then as time pressure set in & money was suddenly not a problem, all that went to the wayside. And by the time Apollo was over, it seems the mindset that rockets are expensive and expandable set in. If it was just inertia or also business interests of the by then entrenched launcher contractors is hard to tell.
We haven't gone again since because there's not much point to it. The US spent an amount of money equivalent to about 10 Manhattan Projects to ultimately put a dozen people on the moon for a cumulative total of somewhat less than one person-month. There was no military utility to it, no commercial benefit, just some science and exploration. Once you've done that a few times, what's the impetus to continue?
The technology was so bleeding-edge that each mission required a huge amount of bespoke manufacturing that got thrown away after a single use, and massive teams of people to run everything, such that each individual mission still cost billions of inflation-adjusted dollars. The American public's stomach for spending such vast sums of money just didn't last. Imagine if you needed to build and throw away an entire Airbus A380 to reach the summit of Mt. Everest. Maybe it would have been summited a few times to show it could be done, but we probably wouldn't keep doing it.
As a result a space race with the Soviets developed, resulting in the USA winning & Soviets loosing - at a price. The Apollo hardware was a racing hardware, like a race car, build to win a race and little more. As a result, the whole program was horrendously expensive to run & it was politically unworkable to continue running it once a victory in the space race has been achieved.
There was no shortage of people calling to continue not just with Moon but space exploration & industrialization in general (with a good example being Gerard O'Neill - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerard_K._O%27Neill#Space_colo...). But they could never get the beancounters & shortsighted politicians to allocate the necessary costs to get things going.
What I think changed is both the technology finally getting cheap enough that more entities can finally get involved without begging a government for a massive budget, because launcher reuse was demonstrated and even just because a bunch of very rich people who like space got involved & can do it themselves without depending on others.
"Removing these 50 objects from orbit would cut danger from space junk in half" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45469259 :
> When will it be safe and cost-efficient to - instead of deorbiting toward Earth's atmosphere - Capture and Haul and Rendezvous and gently Land orbital scrap on non-earth locations like the Moon or Mars or a thrust-retrofitted asteroid for later processing?
Is there any amount of time in a higher altitude orbit - or an Earth-Moon lunar cycler orbit - that would sanitize the outer surface of a spacecraft like ISS? Or will all such attempts cause adaptation?
Would ISS be more useful as an oxygen tank in earth-moon orbit than in Earth's atmosphere and ocean?
But for the moon,
From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45237426 :
> What about solar sintering + induction heating of lunar regolith?
> Basalt, Glass,
> Molten oxide electrolysis of regolith would yield Oxygen, Silicon, Iron, Aluminum, and Titanium for 3d printing and for solar panels and semiconductors.
> Is there a sensor for inside of a rover or a vehicle wheel to sample the regolith falling within the wheel before it pours out to self clear?
Does this model include a regolith map or a soil map? Where is there Carbon on the moon?
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"Lunar soil machine developed to build bricks using sunlight" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45086238
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From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42543663 :
> I wonder if the ISS could instead be scrapped to the moon. [...]
> Because of my love for old kitchens on the Moon.
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"Researchers simulated 30 million routes to the Moon and found a hidden detour through L1 that saves fuel and keeps spacecraft talking to Earth the whole way" https://spacedaily.com/sd-researchers-simulated-30-million-r... :
> Most of a deep-space journey is coasting along gravitational contours that physicists collectively call the Interplanetary Transport Network — a web of low-energy pathways that connect orbits around planets, moons and Lagrange points
- "Earth–Moon transfer via the L1 Lagrangian point using the theory of functional connections" (2026) https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s42064-025-0297-x :
> The results show a reduced fuel consumption of at least 58.80 m/s as compared to the literature. This difference can be useful for mission designers, while the efficiency of the technique can potentially extend the results to other types of transfers in space.
Where are the L1 and L2 Lagrangian points when you consider the mass of the moon in addition to the earth and the sun?
Lyapunov exponents in SQG/DDF too. This month I've been learning about the differences between SQG and DDF Dilatant Dark Fluid (Fedi) in regards to n-body gravity research.